Turn the Page
by Persephone Price
Summary: AU. Set immediately post-S5 finale. "He considered honoring Sam's last request, truly, he did. But they say you can't teach an old dog new tricks: Dean may not be old, but he's lived hard enough in his relatively short life to consider himself ancient." Dean's hunt to find his brother. Dean/OC, but more than just that.
1. Fortunate Son

**Author's Note: I've been watching Supernatural for a while. I didn't want this to happen. There are so many good SPN stories already out there. But I couldn't stop it.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own anything you recognize.**

**Background: The title is a reference to the song _Turn the Page _by Bob Seger (and covered by Metallica). The story is set between seasons 5 & 6 and it's AU. The plot relies on a few slightly altered details in the episodes preceding the season 5 finale, but not many and I don't want to give away what they are right off the bat. It's not drastically different, but if you really hate changes to the show's plot this is not the story for you. I'll probably go in and out of POVs, and it won't be a super long story. **

**Song: Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival.**

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**CHAPTER 1**

**Fortunate Son**

Dean steers the Impala into a dusty parking lot somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere, Illinois. Metallica is blaring, loudly enough to permanently damage his hearing, but not loudly enough to occupy a glaring vacancy beside him. Metallica usually soothes him, but not this time.

It's been a week since Detroit.

He considered honoring Sam's last request, truly, he did. Not because he wanted to – only because it was Sam who had asked it of him. But they say you can't teach an old dog new tricks: Dean may not be old, but he's lived hard enough in his relatively short life to consider himself ancient.

It's not selfishness, the tiny, less damaged part of him insists, that he can't bring himself to give it up. Sammy doesn't understand. (Didn't? Doesn't). Sammy and Bobby and even his dad had something Dean never did: a life apart from this. You can't plunge into something like that without any experience. He's made of a different sort of stuff than most – if he tries to change, it will end miserably. In flames. Like everything else he does. It's considerate, really, that he's not dragging other people down with him.

He's spent the majority of his life (all of it) doing what the people he loves have asked him to. But he will take this for himself.

And so he finds himself at this dingy tavern, indistinguishable from the thousands of others he's visited in his long/short life. _Richard's_, it's called. He likes the name – it's wonderfully generic, and even though he's about ninety-percent sure he's never been there before, he feels like a regular.

He glances back at his beloved Impala and watches its glossy, black finish fade into the night as he gets further away. He feels a swell of pride because this, like his profession, has become wholly his. Technically it belonged originally to his father, but it came as a sweet surprise to discover that he'd been the one to plant the idea in his head. It nauseates him to think he might instead be driving around in an old school VW van, like some sort of dirty hippy.

He steps into the bar, which is outfitted solely in sleek wood and populated with drunks from various walks of life. It _is_ eleven PM on a Monday, he supposes. He fits right in. He immediately shimmies onto a stool and orders a whiskey neat from the young, redheaded bartender, throwing down a couple of bills and bringing the medicine to his lips in one familiar motion. He sits quietly, listening to the constant thrum of the jukebox in the corner and the whirr of dying light bulbs.

He's in town on a job. Something to do with demons scrambling around like chickens with their heads cut off now that their god has been shoved back into his cage. He doesn't really care much about the specifics because he's _really _here to interrogate (read: torture, maim, and kill) every demon he can get his paws on until one of them tells him how to rescue Sam.

Yeah, yeah, he knows he's supposed let it be, blah, blah, blah. But screw that. Sam is his brother, and he's gonna save his ass, just like he always does. This time isn't any different. Sure, maybe the mission will be a bit more elaborate, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. You quickly find in this line of work that _nothing_ is impossible. And with an angel in his back pocket, he has an edge he's never had before.

But Cas has been distant. Whatever cosmic power vacuum has been unleashed in Hell, something similar is going on in Heaven, from what he's gathered. Whatever. It's Cas – it's _Cas_. Maybe he won't be joining him for stakeouts anymore, but he knows he'll come through when he needs him to. He has faith in nothing, but he has faith in this.

Dean, on his third whiskey, turns to his left to see a flannel-clad, gray-bearded man nursing a beer. He looks vexed.

"You from around here?" Dean asks, voice even more hoarse than usual on account of the burning liquor.

The man spares him an obligatory glance, before nodding sharply. "I take it you're not," is his gruff response.

"No," he answers. "I'm in town on a job."

The man's interest is piqued. "What type of job?"

Dean puts on his most winning smile. "Believe it or not," he starts, "I'm FBI – Agent Fogerty."

He extends his hand, but the man's unkempt eyebrows join in a skeptical frown.

"I'm off-duty," Dean explains in regard to his appearance. He carefully retracts his hand, instead wrapping it around his glass. "The Bureau sent me to investigate an unusual influx of occult activity in the past weeks. Know anything about that?"

His fogged eyes widen almost imperceptibly, and he quickly fixes his attention on a bottle of Bacardi behind the bar. As if unable to resist the temptation, he flits his gaze back to Dean. "You really FBI?"

Dean fishes around in his jacket pocket to retrieve his forged badge.

"Name's McCarthy," the man offers after skimming the lettering. "Now, you're gonna think I'm crazy…"

Dean's lip curls into a knowing smile. "Trust me," he says, "I'm used to crazy."

The man – McCarthy – takes the longest swig of beer Dean's seen him take thus far. He has the distinct air about him of a man who doubts his own memory, which he considers promising.

"I wouldn' be sayin' this if I didn't see it with my own eyes," he prefaces, urging Agent Fogerty to trust his sanity. "But I _swear_ to you, a couple o' days ago I saw my neighbor kill his wife – stabbed 'er straight in the gut, he did. There was blood everywhere. Naturally, I called the police as soon as I saw it. But when they got there, the wife was alive in kickin' and they were actin' like nothing'd happened. Now maybe I am a drunken old coot, but I _know_ what I saw. I can't explain it, but I saw it clear as I see you in front of me. There's somethin' unholy goin' on in this town."

"I believe you," says Dean, to McCarthy's obvious surprise.

"You do?"

"Yeah. Where did you say your neighbors live?"

"I didn't. I live real close – a mile or so down the road. If you swing by tomorrow I can show you exactly where it happened. Right now, I gotta go hit the head and call it a night."

"Alright," he agrees. "See you bright and early tomorrow morning." He flashes him a grin.

McCarthy tips his trucker hat and deposits a few coins on the bar, before making his way to the bathroom. Retiring the act, Dean lets his smile drop and stuffs his fake ID back into his jacket pocket, only to have his fingers brush a small, filmy parcel. He pulls it out – it's a photo of him and Sam with their dad, taken not long before Sam left for Stanford. He studies the image morosely before crumpling it in his fist.

The redheaded bartender sweeps the coins McCarthy left into her apron, casting a sidelong glance to Dean. She appears intrigued by the photograph, which he finds inexplicably enraging. He attempts to bite back the stifling heat that's creeping into his esophagus. She opens her mouth, as if she wants to say something, but ultimately decides against it.

"What?" Dean snaps.

She flinches, not realizing she'd been caught. Her desperate desire not to engage is conveyed in her orb-like blue eyes, but after a beat she musters the courage to speak up.

"Why were you talking to Old Man McCarthy?" Her tone is far more confident than he'd anticipated and doesn't match her timid demeanor.

"Old Man McCarthy? That's what you call him?"

She nods wordlessly, still staring like a deer in the headlights.

Dean slides his empty glass towards her, which she promptly refills after tearing her eyes off of him. She mentally notes that this is his fifth whiskey and he is seemingly unaffected. When she's done, she places her hands on her hips and peers at him expectantly in a manner that seems to better suit her.

"I'm running an investigation," is all he says.

"McCarthy's the town idiot," she states exasperatedly. "You can't take what he says seriously."

Dean's light eyebrows arch in amusement. "Is he?" he asks through a smirk. It's clearly a rhetorical question.

The bartender ignores his dismissive attitude and inquires, "What are you investigating?"

Suddenly, a veneer of seriousness washes over Dean's features. He's back in the role. "A large surge of occult activity in the area. Have you heard anything about something like that?"

She purses her lips in a hesitant way that makes him think she has. "No," she contradicts, ostensibly hiding something.

His eyes narrow to daggers. "Withholding information from a federal officer is called obstruction of justice," he recites.

The girl exhales and looks wildly around the bar. There are only a handful of other people present. "Look, in a small town like this teenagers tend to get up to no good," she says wisely. "The occult is just something to pass the time between sneaking vodka from their parents' liquor cabinets and stealing cigarettes."

Dean snickers to himself at her pragmatic tone. "There's been a dramatic increase in cattle mutilations," he points out.

"So they've upped the crazy a bit – hardly a job for the FBI."

He takes a long draught of his whiskey, polishing it off. "We'll see."

. . .

_He looks different, somehow, broken, even though only exactly twenty-two hours have passed since he last saw him. _

_There's a hunger in him, a predatory stain on his face. His cheekbones have caved in on themselves, like the youth has been sucked straight out of him, like he has been robbed of everything that makes him him. _

_This isn't his brother, his little brother, he thinks, but it must be._

_He is on his knees, bloody, as he stands tall over him. Dark and light. Good and evil._

_Or so it has been said._

"_Sam," he chokes, forcing that word out of his mouth with the last remaining scrap of vitality in his shattered body. He can barely speak through the salty blood that is drowning him, bubbling hot in his lungs._

_He bends his neck to gaze down at his brother, eyes sharp but uncomprehending. They are an icy perversion of his true eyes, gone, but in his memory so earnest and kind._

"_We both knew it was going to come to this eventually." _

Dean spasms awake in his shoddy motel room at six AM, after a fitful four hours of sleep. The mattress is lumpy and everything is familiar except the room is half as large as it should be. He sits up and rubs his temples, rubs the nightmares out of his brain.

The stagnant silence blanketing the room sears a hole in his chest, so he blasts the radio to fill the void. Just like in the car, it doesn't quite work. Everything feels a bit surreal and backwards, like he's in a dream that's _almost_ a perfect imitation of his life, but one small detail is off and makes the whole thing unravel.

The words to the song – something by Pink Floyd – thunder through the room, fusing themselves to the very composition of the air. They are mingled with the faint buzz of static.

He can only hear the static.

He takes a swig from the half-empty five-dollar bottle of brandy on the nightstand, wincing. It's not the taste – he needs the taste – it's that he doesn't want to need it.

It's funny how the lack of something can make such a profound impact.

_It's only temporary_, he tells himself, wanting to believe it.

He's in a bad way, he knows. Worse than ever. But there's nothing to be done except carry on. So he rolls out of bed, splashes water on his face, brushes his teeth, and pulls on his cheap suit fast enough to set a record.

McCarthy's house turns out to be a lot nicer than he expected but still not exactly _nice_. What strikes him first, though, is that it's not a home built for one person and he suddenly can't help but suspect maybe "Old Man McCarthy" isn't just a rambling old drunk and maybe he's just trying to get by under less-than-ideal circumstances. Dean can certainly empathize.

He raps on the door and after a few moments McCarthy staggers into view. It's clear that the noise has jarred him out of unconsciousness, but Dean has to give him credit for smiling good-naturedly nonetheless. In the sunlight, he notices his teeth are rotting.

"Hello, Agent Fogerty," he greets, letting him inside. What neglect the exterior could disguise, the interior could not. He wagers the house hasn't been cleaned in close to a decade, and he seriously considers signing the man up for an episode of Hoarders once he's finished the job. It looks like he robbed a dozen liquor stores and drank the spoils, and it sure smells like it too.

"So, your neighbors?"

McCarthy nods and points to the yellow house next-door. It's a bit shabby, but nowhere near as dilapidated as his. At least the grass is cut.

"Mr. and Mrs. Todd Stanley," he says. "As of yesterday, the most perfect, average couple in the whole state. A bit strange, seeing as they've been hurling dishware at one another on a daily basis for the past five years."

Dean chews the inside of his cheek in thought, before asking, "Are they there now?"

McCarthy nods in affirmation. "Yeah, but they should be headin' to church in a bit."

"Church? It's Tuesday."

The older man shrugs, as if it's just as much of an enigma to him. "They've been goin' every morning since I saw him murder her."

This is all Dean needs to hear; he thanks McCarthy for his intel and hastily marches outside, back to the Impala.

Soon enough, the Stanley's emerge from their yellow house and load into a gray sedan. Once they're on their way down the road, Dean shifts the car into drive and pulls out behind them.

He follows them all the way to an Evangelical church that looks to have been built some time in the 1950s. It's made of paneled wood slathered with layer upon layer of white paint; the paint is so thick that he can't help but suspect every time any damage was incurred in one area, they slapped a coat of paint on the whole thing. There's a tidy row of hydrangeas in the front, but it's off-season. The rest of the street is appropriately quiet for eight o'clock on a Tuesday morning. All in all, it's a mind-numbingly ordinary sight.

Apart from the fact that there are_ way_ more cars than there should be.

The Stanley's add their car to a long line of mid-priced Japanese-made cars in the parking lot around back. Dean parks on the street, waiting until they're inside to continue following them.

When they're out of sight, he steps out of the Impala, boots crackling against the gravel, and wrenches open the trunk. He outfits himself with a wide array of weaponry, not knowing quite what to expect. Demons, sure. But how many? How powerful? He straps the Ruby's knife to his ankle and fills his pockets with flasks of holy water. His trusty, demon-killing shotgun stays slung over his shoulder, unconcealed.

He climbs the three concrete steps leading up to the church and pushes the door open. A noisy creak echoes through the empty nave, signaling his entrance; he quickly shifts his gun into a ready position.

"Damn acoustics," he mutters to himself, nevertheless relieved to find there's no one in sight.

_The basement it is, then_, he decides, trying to locate the staircase.

It ends up being in the back, in the priest or pastor or reverend or _whatever_'s quarters. He can't keep his religious terminology straight anymore. Even from above, he can hear some Latin chanting. _Bingo_.

He storms down, unwittingly plunging into a throng of around twenty demons. They turn to glower at him with their obsidian eyes.

"Am I interrupting something?"

"Dean Winchester," one of them, an old lady dressed from head to toe in pale pink, snarls.

"A church," he hums, scoping out the arena. "That's pretty ballsy."

The basement is dank and sticky and reeks of old books and incense. He can't tell if this is its normal stench or if the demons' ritual is to thank. From the looks of things, they're summoning someone.

"Who're you calling?" he asks.

No one answers, but everyone attacks. There's an upheaval of dust and loose papers and in a flash Dean's put each of his bullets into a different demon's skull and still there are some coming at him. He tosses his gun to the side, whipping out the knife.

He slices through every poor bastard until only one remains. Covered in other people's blood, he approaches Mr. Stanley and grabs him roughly by the collar. He sinks the knife into his gut – the wound will kill him eventually, but he'll have plenty of time to interrogate him first.

"Who were you summoning?" Dean snarls violently, pinning him against the damp concrete wall.

The demon grins. His teeth are coated in blood. "It doesn't matter," it spits, spraying his face with red spittle. "If he doesn't come here, he'll come somewhere else."

"Who?" Dean demands, digging the knife into his throat.

"Kill me, it doesn't matter," he laughs.

"Oh I'll kill you," sneers Dean, "nice and slow." He runs the tip of the blade lovingly across his cheek. "But first you're gonna tell me who you tried to summon."

"It was almost too easy, wasn't it?" he prattles on. "We weren't exactly what you would call high level. This stuff is going on around the country – he's coming."

"He? Lucifer's gone, you son of a bitch."

"Not Lucifer. One of us."

"One of you? A demon?"

Todd Stanley's head nods the demon's confirmation. "Crowley."

"Crowley? Who the hell is Crowley?"

"You'll find out soon enough."

Suddenly, the demon latches onto Dean's wrist and shoves the knife into its own neck. Dean watches, stunned, as it slumps to the ground in a bloody heap, along with all the others. He supposes his reputation precedes him. _Good_.

It's not until he wipes his blood-soaked hands on the fronts of his slacks that he realizes he's still wearing a suit. His only suit. Now ruined. _Fuck_.

And now he has to worry about some asshat named Crowley. But if Crowley's the new bossman, maybe he'll know how to save Sam. It's worth a shot.

Deciding his get-up is now beyond repair, he uses the hem of his blazer to clean the knife and the sleeve to clean his face. The soles of his shoes stick to the congealing blood on the floor as he walks towards the staircase, his path illuminated only by the morning light from above.

He steps out of the church and immediately notices a figure at the end of the walkway leading to the road. _Shit_, he thinks as his eyes struggle to adjust to the brightness. He was really counting on no one being around. When he can finally make out what he's moving towards, he sees the redheaded bartender wringing her hands.

He knows he drenched in blood and probably looks a lot like a scene from _American Psycho._ She's not nearly as petrified as she should be.

His knuckles tighten around the wooden handle of his blade.

"I need to talk to you," she blurts out.

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**Author's Note: I will continue to update because I literally cannot get this story out of my head, but I would looooove you forever if you review!**


	2. God & Guns

**A/N: Thank you so much to SassyGrl23 for reviewing! I really appreciate it!**

**Song: God & Guns by Lynyrd Skynyrd**

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**CHAPTER 2**

**God & Guns**

"You're the girl from the bar," Dean says unimpressively. His mind is reeling, and this is the most coherent thought he is able to articulate.

She cocks her head to the side and scowls, as if to indicate that they are past such trifling observations. "I'm a lot more than that, I think."

She stops wringing her hands nervously and instead stuffs them into the denim pockets of her shorts. He gives her a quick once-over and determines she's cartoonishly leggy, to the point where her body looks disproportionate because she's not very tall.

Dean blinks twice, expressionless, before dousing her with holy water.

She wipes her face with her wrist. The moisture causes her eyelashes to clump together. "What the hell?!"

"You've got five minutes."

He walks past her, forcing her to follow him if she wants to retain his attention. He hears her stomping angrily behind him, but doesn't bother to look. Not a demon, not important. Only when he's done unloading his gear into the Impala's trunk does he spin around to face her.

It is then that he really sees her – _studies_ her – for the first time. He thinks offhandedly that she's cute, especially with saturated strands of ginger hair clinging to her face. She's not drop-dead-gorgeous, but pretty and wholesome-looking. In another life maybe he'd chase after her like all the other waitresses and bartenders and nurses and aspiring actresses he's met, but nowadays he doesn't think much about girls. He's too tired.

"Shoot," he says. "Why aren't you freaking out?" He gestures pointedly to his ruined suit.

"We're really gonna have this conversation here?" They're standing far apart from one another on the side of the road behind his car – not exactly the prime setting for a serious discussion.

"Look, sweetheart, I ain't got all day," he says patronizingly.

She sucks her teeth and shuffles her feet in obvious agitation. "Fine. I know you."

Dean's eyebrows weave together. "No, you don't," he refutes.

"We've never met," she allows. "But I know you."

"How?"

"It's hard to explain."

"Try."

"I've seen you. In my dreams."

An errant bark of laughter erupts from Dean's throat and the conversation slows from its rapid-fire pace. "I'll hand it to ya, that's a hellova pickup line, babe, but I don't think now's the time."

She cringes visibly when he uses pet names. "I haven't seen you _per se_. I've seen your name. You must be Dean Winchester, right? And that guy from the photo you were looking at, I've seen his name too, I think."

"Sam." He forms the word with his mouth, but no sound actually passes his lips. Speaking Sam's name aloud is a little too much for him to manage just yet. More loudly, he says, "My brother."

"Yeah. I've seen both of you."

"In your dreams," he parrots, taking time to annunciate each syllable.

She bites her lower lip, disrupting the sheen of her bubblegum-pink gloss. "At first. But now, not just in my dreams – that's how I knew you'd be here. Sam Winchester is in deep trouble."

"Tell me about it," Dean snorts.

Evidently she had not anticipated this sort of response, and her eyebrows shoot up. But Dean is now very grave. "What did you see?"

"Nothing that makes sense…"

He leans back against the trunk of his car, resigning himself to the notion that he's going to have to give her more than five minutes. "You said you saw me here?"

She nods. "When I say see, I don't mean _see_, though. I don't get visions, exactly. They're not images – only words. Letters, burned into my retinas. Sometimes the stories are out of order or the words don't make any sense together. Last night, I saw… something awful. When I was asleep. You on the ground, and your face…" She ghosts her fingertips over the space just below her left, the eye that Sam had punched shut in his dream. In his memory.

Dean does not make a sound, but there is a newfound clarity in his gaze. He understands. She read the transcript of his nightmare. His memory. He has to look away, has to escape – her pity is suffocating him. There's nothing that makes his skin crawl more than the feeling of pitying eyes on him.

"Did that really happen?" she asks quietly.

He grits his teeth and the muscle in his jaw tenses. He turns his head back towards her, but he's not going to touch that question with a ten-foot pole. "You said you saw my brother – is that what you meant?"

"No," she replies slowly, deciding not to push the issue. "Not just that. I keep seeing stories of him on fire, screaming. I don't know if it's a metaphor or what, but –"

"Do you see anyone else?" he interrupts.

"No. Just you two. If you want, I can show you."

His brow creases again in bewilderment. "Show me?"

She nods, earnestly. "I write it down – all of it. When the visions come… It's like a flood. I _have _to write it down. The pain doesn't stop until I write it down."

"Headaches?"

"Yeah. It feels like a laser carving the most horrible stories into my brain."

Dean starts towards the driver's seat, but quickly freezes in his tracks and swivels back around on his heel. "Wait a sec," he says. "If you only see words, how did you know I was me?"

She's unfazed by the question. "I first suspected it when you walked into the bar last night and were asking Old Man McCarthy questions about the occult, and I thought maybe that guy in the picture you were looking at was your brother. But I wasn't sure you were really _you_ until I had the vision about you coming here and massacring those demons."

"You know about demons?"

"Fragments. Only what I've learned through you in the past week."

Dean nods pensively to himself, processing the information. A week. Right after Detroit.

"C'mon," he instructs, yanking the door open.

. . .

She lives walking distance from the church, but still Dean insists on driving. He parks the Impala on this town's semblance of a Main Street and follows her to her apartment; turns out, she lives in a loft above the local tattoo parlor. He finds this vaguely humorous, as she doesn't look the type. (Does he? He thinks he probably does).

"What's your name?" he asks abruptly, as though the concept that she might have a name has just occurred to him. They're mid-way through ascending the stairs to her home and he can't see her face, only her back.

She smiles a little melancholic smile to herself – she'd been wondering when he would care enough to ask. Usually it takes people a little while to see her as something more than just a generic, expendable girl, but she supposes that comes with the territory of working in the service industry. She's been called 'Ginger' or 'Red' or 'Carrot-top' so often that sometimes she considers changing her name to one of them.

"Claire," she states without looking at him.

She unlocks the chipped door to reveal an apartment that appears to have been orderly at one time but was recently struck by a hurricane. There are pages strewn on every surface – every table, every chair, every_thing_. He even thinks he spots a couple in the toaster. Some are typed and some are hand-written, some are in first-person, some in third, and some pages only have a couple of words on them. His hands find the nearest sheet of paper, which is on the kitchen counter.

_There is a distinct pain in having your flesh ripped from your bones and lit on fire all at the same time_, it reads.

"Awesome," he quips.

"Like I said, it doesn't always make sense."

Oh, but these make sense.

"So what, are you psychic or something?" he questions brusquely.

Claire dumps her keys onto her desk and the papers crackle noisily under the fresh weight.

"I was hoping you could tell me," she sighs, shrugging. "That's why I went looking for you this morning. I want this to stop."

Dean scratches the shorter hair at the back of his head in contemplation. "Psychics are usually born the way they are," he reasons out loud. "It doesn't just happen all of a sudden. You said this word vomit is just about me and my brother?"

Again, she nods vigorously in affirmation.

"Weird," he mutters, still rifling through the papers. There are so _many_… It seems impossible that she could have produced them all in just a week. "Do you see things before they happen?"

"I-I don't know. I'm not around for any of it, so I don't have any way of knowing."

"I could try something," he suggests. "I know a guy who might know what's going on. He's hard to get a hold of, but he usually knows his way around this kind of crazy."

"Whatever you think will work," she agrees.

"Okay, don't panic," he prefaces cautiously. "He might kind of just… appear."

When he's satisfied that she comprehends, he folds his hands and closes his eyes in a way that makes him feel absolutely ridiculous. Maybe that's the whole point. Who knows.

"Castiel," he starts, "wherever you are, we could really use your help down here."

His trench-coat-clad friend zaps into the center of the room, displacing a book's worth of papers in his wake. They flutter to the floor like fallen leaves.

Claire gasps audibly, but doesn't speak.

"What is it, Dean?" Castiel asks urgently. His blue eyes are wide and intense, as always. "I want you to know, I am doing everything in my power to find a way to help Sam," he tells him with grim sincerity.

"I know and I appreciate that, Cas, I do. But that's not why I called this time... Something real screwy is going on here," he replies. "This chick is writing all about me and Sam and she's seeing all sorts o' shit she shouldn't be seeing."

Castiel, bad posture and all, turns his attention to Claire, just now realizing that someone else is in this foreign room. "What is your name?" he asks her, though his intonation makes it sound more like an order than an inquiry.

"C-Claire," she manages, still in shock.

"Your full name," he clarifies impatiently.

"Claire Shurley. Who are you?"

Castiel doesn't answer, but clicks his tongue in recognition. "This is very strange indeed."

"What is?" Claire and Dean ask in unison.

"Claire." He glides over to her and places a heavy hand on her shoulder. She thinks fleetingly that he's trying to be reassuring, but somehow the action only makes him seem more ominous. "You are a prophet of the Lord."

Claire staggers back in horror. "A _what_?"

"A prophet. Or prophetess, if you prefer," he confirms. "You were meant to record the trials of Sam and Dean Winchester during the apocalypse – that is the strange part. The apocalypse has been averted. You should never have been activated."

"Activated?" Dean echoes.

"Yes," Castiel says. "Prophets are activated when their time has come to serve God."

"How do you know she's a prophet?" he asks.

"It's ingrained in all of our minds – I know the name of every prophet that ever was and ever will be born. Claire Shurley is one of them." He stares again at Claire. "Are your visions… complete?"

"N-no. They're not."

Castiel nods in apparent enlightenment. "Sam agreeing to serve as Lucifer's vessel must have triggered her activation. Her visions would have been complete if you had accepted Michael, but you did not, and so they are not."

"So, now what?" asks Dean.

"Now? Now, nothing."

"There's no way to make them stop?" she asks hopefully.

"No," he replies bluntly. "You will continue to have these visions until the end of your natural life. If that is all, I must be going."

"W-" before she can get the word 'wait' out, Castiel has vanished into thin air. She sinks onto the sofa, papers crackling furiously once more, and cradles her face in her palms.

"Who was he?" she mumbles.

"My friend, Cas. He's an angel."

"Of course. An angel…" she murmurs darkly, not bothering to further question the insanity of her newfound predicament. There are a few tense moments of silence, before she drones, "So this is really your life? All God and guns and danger?"

He has no better way to phrase it. "Yep."

"Must be tough."

"It is."

Another pause.

She eventually says, "I can't live like this. With these headaches, this _need_ to write."

Dean shifts uncomfortably beside her, but can't help but feel a tug of sympathy in his chest. "Some of this stuff is pretty good," he tries, thumbing through a handful of pages. "Super depressing, yeah, but not bad if you're into that sort of crap. Maybe you could fill out the details and publish it. Just change my name. I don't want my and my brother's business out there for the world to know." It's clear to her that he's floundering to find a silver lining.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," she drawls. "I've already considered that. But if there's a way to make any of this coherent, I don't have the time for it."

He shifts again, not knowing what to say. He was never good with this sort of thing – the whole comforting-the-downtrodden BS was Sammy's gig for a reason. _You need to learn how to do the job without him. Just in case,_ a dark recess of his mind nags.

Out of the blue, Claire is hissing and moaning as if she is in agony. Her eyes are screwed shut and her hands are over her ears.

"What? What is it?" Dean asks frantically.

"Pen. Paper." She reaches for him, features still contorted in pain.

Dean rummages through the squalor to procure both, handing them to her. She hurriedly scribbles down something and the migraine seems to subside. Even though her handwriting is messy, he can read the seven words she has written from over her shoulder:

_Someone else is in here with us_.

He rips the paper out of her hands. "What does this mean?" he demands, shaking it in her face.

He immediately feels remorseful upon seeing the glimmer of absolute terror in her crystalline eyes. It's not him she's scared of, but the prospect of living the rest of her life saddled with this burden. It pains him to realize that he, albeit indirectly, is the cause of this. He is the cause of so much suffering. Always the cause. Never the solution.

Sam is the solution. _Was _the solution.

Sam is gone.

"I don't know," she squeaks. He knows she doesn't know. He doesn't know why he even asked.

He exhales in agitation and runs his hand over the top of his hair, trying to figure out what to do. There's a temporary lull – the only sounds filling the room are Dean's shoes crunching papers as he paces and their erratic breathing.

Surprisingly, it is Claire who breaks the silence.

"Before, were you _praying_ to Castiel?" she asks.

Dean looks taken aback by the question, but nevertheless answers, "Yeah, why?"

"He answers your prayers?"

He regards this as a gross over-simplification of circumstances. "Sometimes."

She pauses, gathering her thoughts, before continuing, "Can anyone pray? Will they answer anyone?"

"I don't know," Dean admits quietly. "But you're not just anyone."

"That's right," she scoffs. "I'm a bartender-slash-Prophet of the Lord."

Carefully, Dean brushes the papers off of the space beside her and takes a seat. "It might be a good time to rethink your career path," he says gently. "Cas didn't seem to think there was a way out of this."

Claire laughs a jaded sort of laugh that doesn't jive with her innocent appearance. "Bartender wasn't exactly the job I chose at the career fair back in Middle School. Neither was prophet. No, I got out. I went to college. I tried to have a life… I got out."

"Why'd you come back?" He sounds appalled by the very idea.

She laughs again, that laugh he finds unnerving. "The same reason anyone ever comes back here: a series of unfortunate events. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Now I get to be a prophet. There's gotta be a way to turn that into a marketable skill." All at once, her expression reverts to that pure, hopeful one he had caught a glimpse of earlier. "I could go with you," she proposes.

Dean shoots into a standing position like he has been electrocuted. Now it's his turn to laugh.

"I don't think so," he says, backing away like he's trying to ward off an unwanted suitor.

"Why not?"

"In case you haven't noticed from your visions, my job is pretty friggin' dangerous."

"I could be useful."

"I doubt it."

"You're trying to find your brother. What if I see something that could help?"

"Call me up. I'll leave you my number."

"I don't want to stay here."

"You said you got out once before – obviously you have your reasons for coming back, whatever they are."

"Yeah, well, fuck that. Life just keeps piling the shit on me. It's time I do what I want."

"Uh-huh. As glad as I am that you're finding yourself and all that spiritual self-discovery jazz, it's still gonna be a no."

"Come _on_."

"You don't know the first thing about hunting."

"I know a little. You could teach me."

"_Hell_ no. Do I look like a babysitter to you? You'll just slow me down. Or worse, get yourself killed."

"I can take care of myself."

"Yeah. Right."

"Please?"

"Why do you even want to come? You don't know me, not really. You don't have any idea what you would be getting yourself into. And don't give me that 'visions' bullshit. Reality and words on a page are two totally different things."

"Even so, I wasn't born in a cave. This is rural Illinois and my dad is ex-military. I know enough about how to survive. And I know that you know the sorts of people that might be able to help me – to help me find a way to make these visions stop."

"Nope. I don't know anyone like that."

"You're a lot more likely to meet someone who knows than I am, though."

"What part of 'no' aren't you getting?"

He's starting towards the door and she's following him again, nipping at his heels like an incensed spaniel.

"Dean."

It sounds strange to hear her say his name. For a second she reminds him of Jo and he feels sick to his stomach. "No."

And then he's gone.

* * *

**A/N: Let me know what you think! In this AU the whole Chuck Shurley thing never happened and instead we have Claire as the prophet. I hope you all liked it!**


	3. I Can't Tell You Why

**A/N: Thank you so so much to ImpalaLove, SassyGrl23, and Wolflihood for reviewing! I appreciate it so much! I hope you all like this chapter.**

**Song: I Can't Tell You Why by the Eagles**

* * *

**CHAPTER 3**

**I Can't Tell You Why**

_He can't see. Not really. It's all just colors and moving shapes and lights. He feels blood leaking from his every orifice, flowing down his face. It drips on his clothes and on the grass where he's kneeling. _

_His own blood. Blood is always in such abundance that sometimes he feels the need to double-check, to clarify, that it's really his. His face is so swollen he can feel his skin split and stretch to the grisly visage of the dead man he will soon be._

"_It was a good run. Your brother fought hard."_

_But he of all people knows the truth, knows he's still fighting. He will never stop fighting._

"_Please, Sam," he begs. Luckily the voice that comes out of his mouth doesn't sound like his and he can pretend the words aren't his either. He doesn't recognize the poor fool speaking. It could be someone else pleading with their baby brother not to kill them, for all he knows. _

"_Oh, Dean." _

_Lucifer is so apt at sounding kind that he almost believes it's Sammy shining through the cracks. _

"_Sam is long gone."_

_No. I'm not gonna leave you._

Dean awakes, sweating, with unwanted tears stuck to his cheeks. "Shit," he grunts, squinting to read the muted green glow of the LED alarm clock. It's the middle of the night.

The scotch, thank god, is close by. He tries to be strong, but sometimes he drinks to unconsciousness because he cannot bear the dreams. The nightmares. His nightmares are his memories; even his twisted imagination could not conjure torments so great as the ones he has already endured. It used to be images of Hell that haunted him, now it's this.

Every night is a game of Russian roulette except all of the chambers are loaded. What horror will unfold tonight? Will he see Lucifer (he knows Lucifer wore the face of a broken man for a long while, but his Lucifer only wears Sam's)? His dead mother? His dead father? Or will he simply be flayed alive, like he was in Hell?

Lately, it's all Detroit all the time.

It is better not to dream, not to sleep. He drinks until it all goes black, until the shrieks stop ringing in his ears and the taste of his own blood has left his mouth.

People talk about dependency and addiction like they're the same thing, but they're not. Addiction implies there's a vice, sought out by some weakness of character. Dependency implies a physiological need.

He _needs_ to be conscious or unconscious, on or off, like a light switch. He cannot stand the in-between.

Or maybe it is all an in-between.

He doesn't know. He doesn't want to think about it. He doesn't want to think about what the drinking is doing to his liver, what repressing all this shit is doing to his sanity. _Carry on, _the voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like John Winchester says. That's all he can do. Carry on.

In the morning, he feels a bit better apart from the dull, throbbing pain behind his eyes. He recognizes it abstractly as a hangover, a familiar and inconvenient pain in his ass. Looking again at the clock, he is surprised and dissatisfied to find that he has overslept.

Omens. He's gotta start looking for omens. Anything that could indicate a big-bad-demon-boss breaking into the world. This would be a lot easier with Bobby on his side, but lately he's not taking his calls.

_I'll show him. It's not pointless, I'm not crazy._

. . .

It's just words.

When she wakes in the middle of the night, shaking in feverish anguish, it's just words that she sees. Simple, innocent words.

They're unrelenting, screaming themselves, repeating themselves over and over and over again until she can get them out, purge her body of their sting. They run from her brain and shoot through her veins, struggling to burst from her fingertips. And just when she washes her face and thinks it's over, they return again. The words are always different, but the pain is the same.

She wonders if it's supposed to hurt so much.

Reading the label on her bottle of Percocet fills her with dread. Same with the Xanax. Letters, letters anywhere, terrify her. It's not possible to live like this, she thinks incessantly. Something that was once so routine has become the monster lurking in every closet and under every bed.

And it has only been a week.

What's even worse is that there's no real productivity to it. When she reads what she writes, she either doesn't understand it or doesn't want to. The stories are empty, comprehensible only to those who already know how they go.

Last night, when she jerked awake, she felt indistinctly that Dean was up too, reliving what she was transcribing. The numbers _3:34 _ – the current time – came out on the page. Maybe their suffering was parallel, maybe they were plagued by different sides of the same beast.

There is no reason she should be involved in any of this. It's just bad luck.

She stops trying to sleep at dawn. The rising sun's pinkish light creeps through her blinds, warm with the promise of a new start. It's easy to be tricked into thinking this one will be better than the last.

Something about watching the birth of the new day makes her recall Dean's prayer to Castiel. The sunlight brings with it a niggling sense of hope – maybe she has a guardian angel watching over her, too. Surely she didn't before, not after everything, but maybe she does now. Maybe now that she's been 'activated' there's someone looking out for her. It's worth a shot.

She kneels at the side of her bed, like she used to do when she was a little girl and everything was still straightforward.

"Please," her voice cracks. "If anyone is listening… _Please_ find someone else. Please. I can't do this. I'm not the right person for the job, I'm not strong enough. It's cruel to make me watch this, of all things, after what's already happened, what's already been taken."

Claire doesn't realize she is crying until her face feels damp. She doesn't know what she expected to happen, but she certainly didn't expect Castiel to appear. In her shock, she scrambles to a standing position.

There he is, in her bedroom. His brow is knitted into a frown, which she's beginning to suspect is his default setting. For a moment he looks just as surprised to be there as she is to see him. However, he says, "There are a lot of angels out there who heard your call. At one time, only the strongest among us were tasked with protecting you."

She quickly wipes her face, embarrassed. Castiel tilts his head as if he doesn't understand the need.

"At one time?" she repeats.

"All the archangels are either dead or locked away," he says. "Lower ranking angels, like myself, are the only ones left. Many were scrambling to come to your aid. It appears I got here first."

"I know you said there's no way out of this," she sniffs, "but isn't there any way you could transfer the abilities to someone else? I'm sure there's some religious nut out there who would be happy to have them."

"That's not how it works," he states flatly. "You are the prophet. You are the _only_ prophet, until you die and the next one in the sequence takes your place. It is not an ability that can simply be 'transferred,' as you say. It is a part of you. It has always been a part of you, dormant, but present. You were born for this purpose, Claire. Many would consider it a great honor."

A stray, tearful laugh escapes her. "Not me."

"I am very sorry you feel that way. Truly, I am, and I wish there were a way for me to help you."

She pauses; Castiel does not seem to be in as much of a hurry as he was the previous day, so she takes a moment to collect herself.

"Why is it just the Winchesters?" she finally asks.

"I do not know," he answers honestly. "For whatever reason, recording the Winchesters' history post-apocalypse was your divine mission." His somber blue gaze flits to the empty prescription bottles on her nightstand. Some are old and some are new, some are visible and some are hidden beneath loose papers. "If the pain is truly unbearable," he starts ruefully, "there may be psychics out there who can teach you methods of managing it. You are not a psychic, but I believe some very strong ones also experience pain with their visions."

"Will being close to the Winchesters make any difference?"

"I don't see any reason why it would, apart from the fact that they would likely be able to interpret what you see. Perhaps that might offer you some solace, I do not know." He peers again disparagingly at the orange bottles. "You should not medicate yourself so heavily – it might make the visions more frequent. Anything that interferes with your…" he struggles to find the right word, eventually settling on, "_sobriety_ makes you more receptive to messages from a different frequency, if you will."

"It just gets better and better."

The Percocet is new, but the Xanax predates this particular mental breakdown. _I guess I'll add managing my anxiety to the long list of shit I'm supposed-to-but-can't deal with_, she thinks.

"I must be going," Castiel says, as though he is afraid to leave her.

"Okay. Good b-" But he's already gone.

She knows she needs to do: she needs to convince Dean to let her go with him. She needs help. She needs all the help she can get.

. . .

Claire has no way of knowing where to find Dean apart from intuition. But it's six-thirty AM and she has to catch him before he leaves, so she uses the shards of knowledge that she has to try to piece together a complete puzzle.

He's probably in a motel – a cheap, seedy one, at that. There are a few in town, but he was coming from Detroit and the first one on his way would be a place called _Trader Springs Motel_. It's the seediest of them all.

Once she's there and she sees his sleek Impala parked in front of room 22, she can't help but feel an alien swell of pride. She pulls her navy Jetta into the space beside it and slides out of the car.

With trepidation, Claire knocks on the door, and Dean opens it with a blunt and unhappy, "You again."

"I spoke to Castiel," she tells him, pushing her way inside. The bed is a wreck of cheap, tangled sheets and there are several empty bottles of alcohol scattered on the nightstand, much in the same way as her prescription bottles. The clock looks like the description she wrote and its battery is buzzing dully like a trapped fly.

"Whaddyou mean you 'spoke to him'?" he questions.

"I prayed to him and he came."

Dean's eyebrows shoot up. "He did?" he asks in undisguised astonishment.

"Yeah." She sits on the edge of his muddled bed. He remains standing, knees wide in a defensive stance, by the door. "He said that I'm important, that there are a lot of angels looking out for me. So you see, Dean, I have built-in protection. You wouldn't have to worry about me slowing you down or getting myself killed."

"Look…" He pauses and considers calling her sweetheart or babe or something similarly condescending, but instead says, "Claire, I'm glad to hear those fluffy-winged assholes are lookin' out for you. I am. But that don't change anything. This is between me and my brother and there's _no_ room for a third party."

"You're forgetting," she replies, voice deathly calm, "I'm already the third party. The passive observer, fated to record all the horrible shit you go through. Even if I'm not with you, you two will always be with me. The least you can do is make it an equal arrangement, at least until I figure out a way to manage this."

"I can't," he grinds out. "I'm sorry, I can't."

She feels tiny needles pricking the backs of her eyes but she doesn't want to cry in front of him, so she turns her gaze to the whitish, mildewed ceiling.

Dean wants to jump out of his skin at the sight. His fingers twitch at his sides. He's deliberately avoided these situations his entire life, and still it's playing out in front of him. Granted, the circumstances are vastly different from any scenario he's ever imagined.

_Crying girls, man_, he remembers once telling a teenaged Sam over a couple of illicit beers. _The worst. You get in – if ya know what I mean –, you get out, and you don't look back for nothin'. _Suffice it to say, Sam had never really taken this advice.

"Hey," he tries, itching to make it stop. He sits beside her but she keeps her gaze averted. "You'll be okay." He has no idea what he's doing. He has no idea what he's saying. "I probably won't be around much longer, anyway. Maybe when I die the visions'll stop."

She snaps her head to look at him, features darkened in dour confusion. To his horror, he recognizes it as an expression he's seen his brother wear many times. "Why would you say something like that?"

Dean coughs out something that resembles a laugh. Now it's his turn to look away from her; he fixes his eyes on his folded hands. "Me and Sam… we're not the types to die peacefully in an old folks home, let's just put it that way."

"Sam is already dead," she says, still confused. She'd begun to notice that Dean talks about him like he's taken a temporary leave of absence, not rotting in Hell.

"For now."

There's a heavy pause.

"Please," she tries for the millionth time, "please let me come with you. I'm begging you."

Once again, he feels extraordinarily uncomfortable. He doesn't know how to respond, how to speak to someone who's addressing him like he has some sort of power. It always seems to be him doing the begging – never the other way around. In fact, he can't even recall a time when he hadn't been the one with the disadvantage. He can barely save himself (really, the jury's still out on that one), but she's talking to him like he can save her, like she needs him.

He's not a bad guy. He's not cruel. But he's not equipped to deal with this.

"Coming with me won't solve anything," he eventually manages. "Your problems… They'd only be multiplied by a thousand if you came with me. You'd lose a lot more than you'd gain, I promise you that."

"Let me make that choice, then. You're not responsible for what happens to me."

It feels so good to hear her – to hear _someone_ – absolve him of this that he almost changes his mind. But in the end, he stays true to his original decision.

"You can't."

She gnaws heatedly on her lower lip, self-respect finally getting the better of her.

"Fine," she snaps, shooting to her feet.

She looks as though she is going to storm straight out of the motel room and out of his life, never to be seen again, so he stops her. "Wait," he says. He pulls a faded receipt out of his pants pocket and quickly jots his phone number down on the back. The motel's thick, plastic courtesy pen feels strange between his fingers.

"Call me if you ever need anything."

First she glares at him, and then she eyes the parcel warily. Apparently unable to resist, she violently snatches it out of his hand and leaves in a flurry.

. . .

It's nighttime when her mind starts boiling again.

_The forest is dark – he doesn't know how or when he got there. It feels as though he hasn't been there long and yet he cannot remember the moment he arrived. He wasn't born here, after all, and even what feels like an eternity he knows must have had a beginning._

The text dances on a backlit screen.

Claire reads what she has typed on her computer. The keys are so worn and discolored they don't make clicking noises anymore and she can barely make out the tiny letters and numbers and punctuation. Her hands fly silently and blindly across keyboard, and yet by some miracle there are no typos.

"Sam," she murmurs to herself.

She digs around in her camel-colored handbag, desperately searching for the paper Dean gave her. After finding it, she punches the numbers into the touch-screen of her phone, wishing she could feel concrete buttons beneath her fingertips.

"Hello?" comes a gruff, masculine voice. She can hear the purr of an engine (or is it an electric guitar?) in the background and the distant rumble of tires on asphalt.

"Dean?"

"Yeah? Who's this?"

"Claire."

"You okay? What is it?"

"I had another vision. About Sam. They're changing. Fast, I think."

She thinks she hears him pull over and knows she hears him cuss loudly, away from the mouthpiece. He's irate because while he could just trust her to continually update him on her 'changing' visions over the phone, it'd be far more sensible to have her with him. Trust was never his strong suit. What if she forgets to tell him something, or doesn't mention an essential detail because she doesn't think it's important? No, it's more foolproof to keep her around so he can keep track of what she sees. If you want the job done right, you do it yourself.

"Changing? Whaddyou mean changing?" he demands.

"He's… He's not in Hell anymore, or at least I don't think he is."

Dean is forty-percent certain his heart stops for longer than is anatomically possible for him to still be alive. His world is careening, spinning out of control, and he attempts to compose himself long enough to ask for clarification.

He doesn't know what words come out of his mouth, but evidently he's accomplished this task because Claire answers, "He was in some sort of woods. I don't know where it was. He didn't know where he was. But it's definitely not Hell."

His heart starts beating again, but now it's his lungs that are rebelling. Through the stale breath of air trapped in his throat, he chokes out, "I'm only a half hour outside town. I'm coming back to get you."

All she hears is the deafening screech of tires on pavement before the line cuts out.

* * *

**A/N: If anyone is curious, I'll delve more into Claire's background in the later chapters. I didn't want to do like a massive backstory dump because I thought it might interfere with the flow of the story. Also I apologize if the plot is not airtight or completely logical - my main reason for wanting to write this was that I felt like Lisa was a total cop-out and I think something different could have been done. Dean has such strong and overpowering emotions that I think it would be fascinating to see him in love, and I didn't get that at all from his relationship with Lisa. It just felt... hollow. I don't know, I was just never really sold on the whole Dean-wants-a-normal-life thing and the Dean/Lisa dynamic was painful. Plus, I wanted to explore how he would deal without Sam, because we never really saw much of that in the show.**

**Please let me know what you think of Claire! Any constructive criticism is very much appreciated! I didn't want to make her super angsty because generally I don't like OCs like that, but Chuck and Kevin were pretty messed-up so I thought it would be fitting to make her at least a little bit similar.**


	4. On The Road Again

**A/N: Thank you so much to SassyGrl23 for reviewing! I hope everyone likes this chapter.**

**Song: On The Road Again by Willie Nelson**

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**CHAPTER 4**

**On The Road Again**

"I used to write before this, you know," she tells him, voice raw with the loss of something.

A bouquet of colored lights flicker past them as they race down the highway, speeding like a bullet to South Dakota. To her, the wide retro interior of the Impala feels like a spaceship. With how fast he's driving and how the glittering flashes pass them by, it's not hard to pretend they're flying through the stars.

"I used to do it for fun."

He's not really paying attention and for a brief moment it seems as though she is nothing more than the narrator of an audio book churning in the background. But no, it's Willie Nelson who is playing, guitar strings thrumming quietly on the radio. The sound lessens the blow of Dean's silence.

She stops talking. She can see he doesn't care, doesn't care that she's lost pieces along the way too. His own pain consumes him utterly and completely.

"Where are we going, again?" she asks instead.

"My friend Bobby's," he answers. "If anyone knows anything about supernatural woods, it's him."

She nods to herself. Dean seems to have a lot of friends who know a lot about things that shouldn't be real. It's strange to discover a whole community operating in a different, parallel world – a community that she is now part of. All those horrible things, those natural disasters – people everywhere said it was the end of the world and she thought they were lunatics. Turns out they were right.

"You couldn't just call him?"

He opens his mouth, but hesitates. "Well… He's not exactly taking my calls at the moment."

"What? Why not?"

"He thinks what I'm doing is '_self-destructive_'," he snorts, gripping the wheel imperceptibly tighter.

"He's probably right."

"Maybe before. But not so much now that I've got someone with a direct line to that oversized melon of his." _His_. Sam's. She has to clarify this pronoun in her head, but Dean never does. It's all _Sam Sam Sam_ knocking around in there.

"Do we drive all night?"

"Generally. We've got about seven hours to go, but you can get some shuteye if you want. Trust me, I'm used to driving alone." Nowadays. He's used to driving alone _nowadays_.

"Sleep has become something of a rare commodity in my life."

He casts her a sidelong glance that catches her off guard because it is full of genuine understanding. It says more than a sentence ever could. It offers solidarity. It is the look of a man who hasn't truly slept in years.

How can they be human if they can live without so many of the things that are supposed to sustain them?

Her computer burns a hole in her lap. It carries with it both the vague comfort of a heating pad and the physical reminder of her plight. But it's there, ready, in case she has to record some new outpour of Winchester angst.

"You leave anyone behind back there?" he asks abruptly. He can't afford to be slapped with an abduction lawsuit on top of everything.

"Just my parents," she murmurs.

"What did you tell them?"

"I told them I was going on a road trip with a demon-killer I met yesterday to figure out how to stop being a Prophet of the Lord," she drawls sarcastically.

He makes a face.

"I told them I was going away for a little while to deal with some personal shit. They're not gonna come looking, if that's what you're worried about. I'm twenty-five, for Chrissakes, not some teenager running away from home."

"Fine. You an only child then?" He had, in his extensive experience with the feminine variety, come to learn that the parents of only children are far more… _aggressive_, regardless of age.

"Now."

"Now?"

"I had two brothers. Once."

She doesn't offer any more information and so he doesn't ask for it. The only reason Sam has ever come up is because he is inescapable. If he could have avoided it, mentioning him, he would have.

"Okay," he says, and she is grateful that she doesn't have to explain herself. Maybe someday she will, but not tonight. It's already been too much too fast.

. . .

"Bobby! Open up, it's me!" Dean pounds on the door so forcefully it threatens to pop off its rusty hinges.

The house is rickety and in the middle of a junkyard; a sense of uneasiness seeps into Claire's stomach and she can't help but fear that maybe she didn't think this through well enough. Is she about to be lured into an axe murderer's lair? Is Dean really who he says he is? Luckily, it's around ten in the morning and the place isn't quite as creepy as it could have been, and in any case she is tangled too thoroughly now to extricate herself.

Bobby takes his sweet time getting to the door. All the while, Dean looks a bit like a kid who's been put in time out.

"Maybe he's not home?" she tries.

"He's always home."

As if on cue, there is a rustle from within the house. Bobby appears, beard and flannel and trucker hat and all.

"What're you doin' here, boy," he grunts. For a 'friend,' Claire thinks, he doesn't look very pleased to see him. His sharp, beady eyes flit to the redhead. "Oh balls, she's not pregnant, is she?"

Dean shoves past him, nose scrunched in affronted scowl. He rolls his eyes and snaps, "No, you idiot." However, deep down they both know that if such a thing were to ever occur (and it wasn't _really _out of the scope of possibility), Bobby's would indeed be his first stop.

Claire carefully shuffles past the crotchety old man (he's really not _that_ old, she acknowledges later), sticking close to Dean. An acute displeasure at the suggestion is displayed clearly on her face, too.

"Well _ex-cah-use me_," he drawls, "but the last time you brought a girl here was more than four years ago and she was possessed by a demon. So forgive me if I'm a tad bit suspicious."

"Well, she's not possessed and she's not pregnant," Dean retorts with fake cheerfulness.

After slamming the door, Bobby lumbers over to address him face-to-face. "Who is she?" Seeming to abruptly remember that the object of their discussion is indeed a walking, talking person, he turns to her and asks, "Who're you?"

"My name is Claire," she says, sounding unsure as she inspects his dusty home. "Apparently I'm some sort of prophet."

"A prophet?" he echoes in disbelief. His eyes travel from her feet to the very top of her head, sizing her up. "Prophet my ass."

"She's telling the truth, Bobby."

"Well shit. This is how they're makin' prophets nowadays? What happened to Matthew, Mark, Luke n' John?"

"Now we've got the Gospel of Claire," Dean confirms.

"Hell, sign me up for Bible study." There's something extraordinarily disquieting about the appreciative way he's eying her Daisy Dukes and Claire suddenly feels naked.

"Cut it out, ya old perv," he says, cuffing Bobby on the back good-naturedly. "She's not just any ole prophet – she's _my _prophet. Well, mine and Sam's."

"I'm not _yours_," she snaps fiercely, finding her voice. "For whatever god-forsaken reason, my visions are centered on the Winchesters," she explains.

"Yeah, that's what I meant." His tone is innocent, but his wolfish smirk is most assuredly not.

Now it's her turn to roll her eyes.

"Alright you two, enough with the teenage mating ritual," Bobby scolds crankily. "What brings you to my neck o' the woods? And if you say you need help finding Sam, so help me God –"

"I've got a lead," Dean interrupts. "Claire, she's the key."

"What in the name of all that is holy are you talkin' about?"

"Claire's been having visions about Sam, and the visions are changing. Sam's not in Hell anymore."

"That's impossible."

"Until a couple days ago I thought prophets were impossible. But I'm tellin' you Bobby, she's the real deal. I've read what she's written, and there's no way she could've known half the stuff she does if she wasn't."

"Ever think maybe she's just psychic?" he suggests dryly, as though this is the obvious explanation.

"I did think that, but she's not. She's a prophet – Cas confirmed it."

"Okay… Still… That don't mean she's got a live feed on Sam. Maybe she's just seeing where Sam _thinks _he is."

"My most recent vision was much different than all the ones before it," she tells him. "In the others, Sam was in extreme pain. But not in this one. I'm sure of it – he's not in Hell anymore."

"Well then where hell is 'e?"

"I don't know," she admits. "In a forest somewhere."

"A _forest_?"

"That's why we need you, Bobby," Dean interjects. "Is there any lore on supernatural forests? Maybe forests as gateways to Hell?"

Bobby shuffles over to a weathered bookcase and begins pulling out several thick, leather-bound texts.

"An assload," he grumbles in reply. "Forests are right up there with cemeteries on the list of most supernatural places on earth."

"Yeah, well, wanna give us the highlights?"

"The two places that come to mind first are Clifton, New Jersey and a place called Hellam in Pennsylvania. They're both in the woods and they're both flooded in urban legends about being gateways, but I don't know how much truth there is to the myths."

"They worth checkin' out?"

"Maybe. But Dean, if your brother was wandering 'round the woods in Jersey, don't you think he'd've found a way to contact you by now?" Bobby's tone is pleading and Claire gets the distinct impression that the two men have circled around this issue before.

Dean purses his lips, as he tends to do. "I dunno. But I gotta check out every lead I've got – I'm not gonna let him rot down there, even if he asked me to. I ain't givin' up on him."

"So you've said," Bobby sighs. He looks warily at Claire, as though he doesn't want to air out their dirty laundry in front of her.

"These visions are mostly centered around Sam?" he asks her.

She nods. "Dean too, sometimes, when they're thinking about one other."

Bobby stares at Dean in mild alarm. "She sees my dreams," he states bluntly. It only takes a glance for him to tell what Bobby really wants to know. "She knows what happened in Detroit."

His features slacken in surprise. Try as he might, he could never get Dean to talk about what happened. This girl – this _stranger_ – knows more than even he does, than anyone should. He momentarily wishes he could pick her brain to see how his surrogate son is holding up. Poorly, he imagines, but he'd like to know just how poorly.

From the first moment Bobby rejoined Dean after Detroit, the only thing on the kid's mind was saving Sam. There was no grief, no mourning, just pure, blind determination. Bobby was there for some of it, but he'd been pulled offstage before the climax. He asked him what happened after – just asked him to recount the events – but he wouldn't utter a word. It was only _I gotta save Sam, I gotta save Sam_ chanted over and over again until he'd convinced himself that saving him was possible and that doing so wasn't directly defying his last wishes. Each incantation was like a brick, and together they formed a wall that kept the darkness inside from swallowing him up.

Bobby let him build the wall because he was afraid it was the only thing holding him together. If Sam was truly gone, it didn't really matter whether or not Dean was honoring his promise to him, so long as he was alive. And if this was what it took to keep him alive, so be it. He just couldn't bear to be a part of it. Dean seems to forget that he had loved Sam too, and poking at the memory of him with a stick isn't a healthy way to deal with his loss.

He appears to be functioning, now. At least he's not alone. The girl will probably keep him from putting a bullet in his brain, he thinks. The nature of their relationship isn't clear to him, and frankly he doesn't care. Just as long as he's not alone.

"So what, now you're gonna jet off to Pennsylvania?"

"Looks like. Check the hospitals and the prisons, like always, and if there's nothin' fishy we'll move on to Jersey and do the same."

"And if that don't work?"

"I got a plan B. There's some big-daddy demon named Crowley that's planning on buyin' a condo somewhere in the continental US – he probably already has, by now."

"So?"

"If he's the new boss, he probably knows what happened to Sammy."

"And you're gonna find him?"

"If push comes."

"And you're goin' with him?" Bobby asks Claire.

"Yeah."

He turns to Dean. "You're takin' her with you?" He asks the two questions as though they're unrelated, which she finds peculiar.

"Yeah. If the visions change, I need to know."

"How many you get a day?"

She's somewhat taken aback, but answers, "Usually around two. One while I'm asleep, and then again at some other time. I didn't get one last night because I didn't sleep, I think."

Bobby lets this sink in, before starting, "There's another elephant in the room that we haven't talked about." He pauses, perhaps for dramatic effect, before continuing, "If Sam really ain't in the Pit, what in the _hell_ busted 'im out?"

. . .

They eat lunch in Sioux Falls and leave immediately after. It will be at least a two-day trip to Pennsylvania, and in Dean's mind they don't have any time to spare.

He seems at peace when he's driving, Claire notices. It's one of the few times she's seen the misery filter out of his face. He looks… free, like he's thinking _this is what it was all for_.

She hopes he doesn't catch her watching him because that could open a whole new can of worms.

A problem she had previously overlooked is quickly becoming apparent: she is spending her every waking moment with a man she hardly knows.

From what she's gathered (namely Bobby's immediate assumption that she was pregnant), Dean is a womanizer and she doesn't want him to think (_don't you mean know? _her brain teases) that she finds him attractive. There is a reason she is here and it does not involve becoming a notch in a bedpost. He uses women – that much is clear – and this disgusts her. It doesn't matter that he's handsome, that she finds it hard to stop staring at him, or that his cockiness somehow and inexplicably morphs into charm. These are obviously traits that have served him very well – it could never be said that Dean Winchester was born _entirely _unlucky.

But, she tells herself, you shouldn't judge a person you only met two days ago. She doesn't really know him yet.

Sure, she knows his worst nightmares and deepest fears, but she doesn't know _him_, Dean, the person and not the shattered hero. What if he snores?

And then there's the fact that they're an unlikely pair, which leads to a whole different set of issues.

The waitress at the diner thought they were a couple, which means other people will likely assume the same. Her flaming hair and pale skin pretty much ensure they're not mistaken for siblings, so this leaves a short list of other possible relationships they could share and a long list of possible awkward situations they could find themselves in.

And they're gonna be sharing a motel room. Constant contact in close quarters is guaranteed to lead to some uncomfortable encounters.

Her motel room fears are realized sooner rather than later. After hours of driving, they have to stop to fulfill their basic needs: eat, sleep, bathe, etc.

They stop in Madison, Wisconsin.

One room. Two beds. The woman at the front desk looks perplexed but doesn't ask questions.

Dean recalls all the times he and Sam were mistaken for a gay couple and decides that maybe there is one thing he doesn't miss about his brother after all.

"No cleaning service for us," he tells the clerk, only causing her confusion to mount. Claire doesn't notice that the name on his credit card is 'Steve Jobs,' and apparently neither does the confused lady.

Dean travels light, and Claire wouldn't have expected any less. She had tried to do the same, but inevitably he complains about the amount of _stuff_ she has as soon as he opens the trunk.

Nevertheless, he carries her overstuffed knapsack into the room for her like it's second nature. To not draw attention to the weirdness of it she just says thanks and he nods.

He lets her use the bathroom first, and when it's his turn she hears him grumble, "What is all this shit," from behind the closed door. It occurs to her suddenly that while he probably has a lot of _experience_ with women, he might not know that much about the day-to-day stuff. It was only ever just him and Sam.

When he emerges from the bathroom, the lights are still on but she is already asleep. Her features are relaxed and he can't help but think she looks a little like a more angelic version of Anna, because every aspect of her complexion is nearly the same but just a bit lighter. Her hair is stunning. No bottle could ever produce such a vivid, golden red.

Perhaps uncharacteristically, Dean stops himself from ogling her further – he pretends he doesn't notice that the covers have ridden down and he has a prime view of one slim, creamy thigh. He's tired.

After such a grueling trip, he doesn't need booze and she doesn't need pills to fall asleep. They quickly find unconsciousness.

…

…

…

…Until she wakes screaming at three in the morning.

Dean leaps out of bed, half-asleep and pistol ready, before he realizes what is actually going on.

Thankfully it was motel policy to place a pad of paper and pencil next to the bed. Even in the absolute dark, her hand flies across the small page.

When the episode is over, the pencil lands noiselessly on the carpet and she clamps shaking hands over her ears, putting her head between her knees. Before reading what she's written, Dean replaces the gun under his pillow and crouches down in front of her. Not just her hands are shaking – her entire body is trembling violently. He places his hand lightly and platonically on her kneecap in an uncertain attempt to steady her.

The bleariness has left his eyes as he peers up at her through her curtain of hair.

"Hey," he whispers. "You're okay. It's over now." His fingertips are warm as they move a fraction of an inch against her skin. She's still shaking and whimpering, so his hands move to her shoulders and hold her, grip her, make her see what is real.

This feels suddenly familiar. Bony shoulders were once broad and sturdy. Shaking was once thrashing. Visions were visions, headaches were headaches. Sam was once the one sitting on the edge of that bed.

"Just take a deep breath," he tells her, remembering what he used to tell his brother. "In and out." He sucks in a breath through his nose and exhales loudly and evenly, guiding her, showing her how to do the same.

She finally stops hyperventilating and her body begins to still under his palms.

"Thanks," she gasps almost inaudibly.

He stands takes a step back. "Don't mention it."

Her eyes are so vast and wide and the way she's looking up at him fills his stomach with an unpleasant sensation. He can't identify what it is, but he doesn't like it.

They read the message together. It's short, like the one she had the last time she was with him.

_There are monsters here._

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**A/N: Pretty please review! Hopefully everyone was in character, and if not please don't hesitate to let me know!**


	5. Helter Skelter

**A/N: Thank you so much to Guest, ImpalaLove, SassyGrl23, athiusa, and toridw317 for reviewing! You guys are amazing, and yes, this will eventually be Dean/OC. I hope everyone likes this chapter.**

**Song: Helter Skelter by The Beatles**

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**CHAPTER 5**

**Helter Skelter**

It is late at night when they arrive in Pennsylvania. There is nothing for them to do but grab a bite to eat, book a room, and wait until tomorrow to search for the gate and hit up the hospitals and prisons.

They have already driven through more states than Claire has seen in her entire life.

She hasn't had a vision since last night in Madison, so she fully expects to have one tonight. She tries not to think about this as she shovels French fries into her mouth.

_There are monsters here_.

Sam is in dire trouble, Dean immediately assumed. And maybe he wasn't wrong. But since this prophecy he has become almost rabid in his desire to find his brother. He somehow manages to brood even while stuffing fast food down his throat.

"Don't you ever get sick of cheeseburgers?" asks Claire, trying to lighten the mood.

"Hell no. Cheeseburgers are God's greatest creation."

"God?"

"You know what I mean." Simple words mean complex things now. He doesn't like it. He wishes things could go back to the way they were before, when he didn't know the words to an exorcism by heart and he drank more coffee than booze. The Dean who spent forty years in Hell laughs at the futility of this.

He gets that bereft look in his eye again and Claire brushes her hand over the one that isn't holding the greasy burger. She has come to learn that Dean is a tactile person. What he did for her back in Madison, while it might have seemed somewhat insignificant, was monumental. It wasn't anything he said, but his touch and presence was an anchor, an anchor that she hadn't realized she needed so desperately.

He prefers actions to words, the physical to the intangible. Her life has been ruined by words, so she is happy not to use them.

Those green eyes lock hers, swimming with puzzlement and surprise, but he doesn't pull away.

"Claire," he starts gruffly, looking back down at his ketchup-smattered plate, "what is it you're getting outta this?"

It's like he wants to ruin it. She rips her hand away with superhuman speed; fast enough for him to forget it was ever there in the first place.

"The truth." Her tone is hard and cold.

He looks up again. "You're not still holding out for some psychic savior?" It stings that he would mock her only glimmer of hope, especially when she tries her best to foster his.

"I help you, you help me. Isn't that how it goes?"

"I guess," he mumbles through a mouthful of half-chewed food.

He's started doing this. Whenever they broach something serious he changes the subject, whenever she shows him any sincerity he panics. It's like all his emotional reserves are occupied by family or pseudo-family and the fact that he's spending so much time with someone who doesn't fit into one of these categories is sending him off-kilter. Because at his core, Dean is (was) a people-person, and he likes (liked) making friends. But things have changed and here's this girl and _what's the point._

One time, when he was around seven, Sam found a stray kitten under one of the cars in a Kentucky motel parking lot. It was a skinny, flea-ridden, orange tabby in terrible shape.

"C'mon, Sammy. Leave it," Dean had shrewdly ordered.

But he didn't listen, never listened.

Dean was allergic and Dad told him right off the bat that he had a zero-tolerance policy when it came to animals, but little Sammy hid it in the bathroom and took care of it all the same. He fed it with an eyedropper and washed it with a toothbrush because it was too afraid of a direct stream of water, all the while knowing he would have to leave it behind in the end.

Cut to two weeks later, he named it something stupid like Fluffy or Felix or Garfield and it could hop and meow and its fur had regained its luster. Sam cried like a baby – big, wet tears, snot flowing out of his nose, the whole nine yards – when they left that thing in the same parking lot where they'd found it.

Dean never understood it. He had warned him. Sam had known all along what was going to happen. Little Fluffy or Felix or Garfield almost certainly got run over by a car within the month; Sam had spent all that time fawning over him for no reason.

As tempting as it is to save a kitten, sometimes, when you know it's gonna end bloody, you just gotta leave it. If you don't, you're only hurting yourself.

Dean had never much liked cats. But when he got older, he realized he liked people.

"Dean?"

"Huh?"

"You ready to go?"

"Wha-yeah, yeah. Let's go." He throws some cash down on the table and follows her out.

. . .

There were no visions that night. Not a word. It was almost doubly scary because the anticipation was crushing and constant. At least after the visions come, there is relief. Now, now there's this terrified waiting, this sense of impending agony. The calm before the storm isn't really calm at all.

Dean is not pleased that the connection has gone quiet, and he's not hiding it as well as he thinks.

"You sure you didn't see anything?" he asks as they cruise through town. "Not even a dream?"

"For the hundredth time, _no_. Trust me, I would know if I'd gotten a vision."

"Shit," he curses. "All we've got to go off is that he's 'in the woods with monsters.' That's just awesome."

"I'm sorry," she tries, not quite knowing what she's apologizing for.

They pull into the hospital complex, behind a fleet of ambulances. Claire is fairly certain this is an illegal spot, but he doesn't seem concerned and she figures he intends to get in and out of the building as quickly as possible.

The lighting is harsh and there's a vague, encompassing stink of chemicals mixed with something more obscure – death. He has always hated hospitals – especially after what happened with his dad – and he represses a shudder as they stroll through the automatic doors.

Inside, Dean does all the talking. He approaches the peroxide-blonde nurse at the front with ease and purrs, "Hi," he squints to read her nametag, "_Sarah_. I'm wondering if you can help me."

His attempt at flirtation falls flat as 'Sarah' skeptically eyes a lost-looking Claire.

"What can I do for you?" she asks dryly.

"I'm looking for my brother," he says, a bit more seriously. "He's big, about yea-high, and has a long mop of brown hair like a '70s porn star. Anyone like that come in here in the past few days? He might not have given his name…"

Sarah raises her manicured brows and turns to the computer beside her, scrolling through with a level of interest that might have indicated she was playing Solitaire instead.

"No, I'm sorry," she says eventually. "We don't have anyone fitting that description."

Dean smiles without showing his teeth. "Okay. Thanks."

He hadn't thought it would be that easy, anyway. It never is.

All at once they're back in the Impala, on their way to the police station, and he's telling her she has to wait in the car because he doesn't have a fake badge for her. _Yet_. He says 'yet' and a white-hot current of alarm shoots through him. He wishes he could shove the word back down his throat not for her sake but for his, because it betrays his traitorous subconscious. It affects him more than it should. He leaves the car in a hurry.

The Beatles are playing. She keeps the radio on his beloved classic rock station as she waits. She likes this type of music, too. It's what she grew up listening to, it's what her dad and her brothers played on the way to every family camping trip in Canada. Her mom tolerated it, but she liked it.

It's easy to tell that Dean is the oldest child – maybe it takes one to know one, but the nuances in Dean's behavior reveal that he's spent most of his life taking care of someone else. He walks half a step in front of her, always lets her use things first, takes the smaller bread rolls for himself. It all seems very habitual. She used to think this was just chivalry, but that night in Madison taught her differently. She knows because she used to be a big sister, and that's exactly how she would have treated him if their positions had been reversed.

He startles her when he climbs back into the car.

"No dice," he announces.

"So, to the woods?"

"To the woods."

. . .

Dean could have spent – _would _have spent – the entire night scouring the forest for traces of his long-lost brother.

But when darkness falls, Claire has to put her foot down. They have been trekking over leaves and branches and trees stumps and streams for hours. He has been shouting his brother's name to the heavens_, Sam, Sammy, Sam_ until he lost his voice. All they've found is an abandoned storage shed filled with angry raccoons.

The woods are crisp and cold and now that the sun has gone away it is easy to get disoriented. The air feels thin, fleeting in her lungs.

"Dean," she tries softly, two steps behind him as he waves his flashlight between sinewy tree trunks. "He's not here."

"You don't know that," he growls, the words rasping and straining to break free from his larynx. Manic frustration has set in. She can see he's starting to spiral. He's confused, he doesn't know what to do, and he's scrambling to find a direction. He's drowning in a cycle of disappointment and he can't bear to start at the beginning again.

"We'll try New Jersey." Her tone is soothing but it ricochets off him, wasted and ineffective.

She puts a hand on the sleeve of his canvas jacket to get his attention. He wrenches away instantly, whirling around to look at her.

"You're supposed to be the one with the insight," he snaps viciously. "_You're_ supposed to be the one who knows where he is! Two days, and no visions. If you can't do that, can't do what you're meant to do, what friggin' _God_ means for you to do, then what's the point of you?"

Claire drops her hand, stunned.

Dean feels repentant as soon as the admonition tears from his mouth, but it's already too late.

She backs away from him, beating down the lump that is searing through the lining of her esophagus, as he starts after her.

He scrubs his hands over his face. "I –"

"No, it's fine," she cuts him off. "Stay. Look for Sam. I'm going back to the motel. Good luck."

There's no point in getting upset about it. They don't really know each other anyway.

. . .

In the dead of night, Dean stumbles into the room reeking of alcohol. Because of this, his nostrils can't detect that the room reeks of alcohol as well.

With some difficulty, his eyes scan his rotating environment.

Claire is spread out on her bed, all hair and limbs and crinkled sheets. She is still in her day-clothes, which is unusual because she – unlike him – always changes into pajamas. The whiskey numbs the twinge of remorse he might have felt upon seeing her. He got drunk because he didn't want to feel anything, and he doesn't. Next to her are three empty, travel-sized bottles of liquor from the mini-bar and a half-full prescription bottle. He drags his feet over to the plastic container, taking it in hand.

His eyes struggle desperately to read the label, but the letters never quite come into focus. He abandons this endeavor after a while, deciding instead that whatever the medicine is, he thinks she probably should not have mixed it with alcohol. Nevertheless, the rise and fall of her chest assures him that she is still breathing and therefore alive. No harm done.

She must be totally passed out, because she doesn't even stir as he fights his way to the bathroom. The furniture comes out on the worse end of this battle and he thinks he broke a lamp.

It isn't until he's ready to join his unconscious companion in alcohol-induced slumber that he notices the sheet of paper lying squarely on his pillow.

The words list dangerously to the right, but the handwriting is large, blocky, and legible, although at the beginning and end of the note it is decidedly shakier.

_Dean –_

_Cas told me that visions come more easily when you're not sober, and turns out he was right. So don't worry, I didn't go on a bender for nothing – not that you would worry anyway – I just wanted to try to bring on a vision. It worked. This is the first time it has ever been in 1__st__ person:_

'_It is strange here. I don't feel tired, don't feel hungry, don't feel so much of what I should. In any case, there is no water to drink and no food to eat. Just trees. Every day is the same and I don't sleep because the sun doesn't go down. It stays in the middle. It's never bright, but it's never dark, either. It's just steady and constant, like we are trapped in one moment, like no time is passing. _

_I'm not alone. There are monsters here. Monsters that I know, monsters that know me, monsters that I've killed, monsters that beg me not to kill them. I kill them anyway, even if I already have.'_

_I can't make much of this, but maybe you can._

___– _C 

The only thought Dean has before he unwillingly falls asleep is that he has failed again.

. . .

Both wake with pounding headaches, at nearly the same time.

The atmosphere in the room is viscous and the first thing Dean wants to do is apologize, but he doesn't know quite how to form the sentence or what to say and so he doesn't say anything at all. He just rolls out of bed, rubs the sleep from his eyes, and says, "You wanna use the bathroom first?"

Claire's head is all mixed-up and her eyes are swollen and aching.

"M'kay," she mumbles.

He hears the water run, after a _'For the love of god, put the toilet seat down when you're done!'_

This doesn't faze him as he remembers all the worse shit he's done lately. He thinks to himself, _I made her wash down heavy-duty pills with tequila, rum, and vodka_. It was his fault, wholly and truly. Lots of things were his fault. This one was direct.

And the next thing he thinks is, _Oh, and where the fuck is Sam? _He rereads the note because his mind hadn't really registered it last night. To his chagrin, only confuses him and trying to sort out what it could possibly mean makes his head pound like a jackhammer. He crumples the paper in his fist.

Out of the blue, his phone starts vibrating obnoxiously against the wooden surface of the nightstand.

"Hello?" he answers.

"How's it goin' down there?"

"Bobby?"

"Yeah. Find anything?"

He clenches his teeth at the unwelcome reminder. "Nada."

"Sorry to hear that. I_ may _be able to help, though. You still headin' to Jersey?"

"That's the plan."

"Good. I don't think you're gonna find Sam there, but you should still go. I've been hearin' reports of some sort of monster roaming in the woods. They're callin' it the Jersey Devil."

Dean, feeling a surge of rage, forces his tone to remain even. He did not ask for a detour. "You said you could help?"

"Yeah. That stuff you said about the woods? Well, I've been doin' some research. Woodland iconography is sometimes used to describe a little place called Purgatory."

"Purgatory?"

"Yeah, as in the in-between bit."

"You think that's where Sam is?"

"Could be."

"Claire had another vision. She said Sam isn't alone, he's with a bunch of monsters – some he knows and has killed before."

"Sounds like Purgatory to me."

"How do we get there?"

"I haven't the foggiest. You're gonna need to find someone else to help you with that part. I know a good psychic in Vegas, if it comes to it. Try askin' Cas first, though."

"Okay. What's the name of the psychic?"

Dean's voice is more hopeful than Bobby has heard it in months, but he is no fool. He knows that if he gives him the name he'll go straight to Vegas.

"Not so fast. First I want you to work the Jersey Devil case, then we'll talk. Five people are dead and you're only a few hours away."

"Fine," he grits out.

"Okay. Good. Call me when you've ganked the bastard."

Bobby hangs up and it's lucky Dean is on the bed because he just lets the phone drop out of his hand. Had he been standing, it might have cracked on the ground.

Claire exits the bathroom with sopping wet hair and stares at Dean with an unreadable expression. He averts his eyes. "I'll just be fifteen minutes," he says, "And then we can get going."

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**A/N: Let me know what you think! Any advice is very much appreciated :)**


	6. Can't You Hear Me Knocking

**A/N: Thank you so much to toridw317 and Guest for reviewing! **

**Song: Can't You Hear Me Knocking by The Rolling Stones**

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**CHAPTER 6**

**Can't You Hear Me Knocking**

It is humiliating not to have your prayers answered, Dean thinks. He doesn't know how everyone else does it.

Maybe he's spoiled, but when he calls Cas and that halo-totting dick doesn't answer, he feels abstractly like a needy girlfriend. Dean has never been on the receiving end of this sort of treatment before, and he doesn't like it one bit. He knows he's busy in Heaven or whatever but _sheesh_, how many times does he have to try? It's an emergency!

Off to New Jersey it is, then. It's only around a three-hour trip.

When he tells Claire this she looks remarkably unsurprised and he briefly wonders if she's had a vision about it already; turns out she had just overheard him taking to Bobby. She doesn't ask what Purgatory is.

He wants to apologize. He does, truly. She hasn't uttered more than an 'okay' to him and he knows he's hurt her feelings. He just can't find the right way to say it. He's not good with this sort of stuff. She has such a way with words – literally – that he can't help but fear that anything he attempts to say will be underwhelming or fall flat.

Really, he's over-thinking it. What she's probably mistaking as stubbornness is really just insecurity. Her reaction to him shouting at her reveals that she's a bit more sensitive than he'd thought, and he's afraid that whatever he says might be misconstrued.

So, he eventually opts for simplicity.

"I'm sorry," he blurts out abruptly and inelegantly, gaze fixed on the road and shoulders tense. "I shouldn't have lashed out at you the other day."

Several beats of silence pass as she lets the impact of the statement sink in. After a minute she replies, "It's alright. I know you're under a lot of stress."

"That's one way to put it," he scoffs. His smirk withers away when he glances over at her and sees she is watching him solemnly.

"You shouldn't beat yourself up about not finding him yet. You're doing everything you can."

His jaw clenches and she recognizes this as a telltale sign that she's touched a nerve. Usually, in moments like this, he doesn't respond and tries to forget she said anything at all. But this time he says, "I know."

It's an extremely simple phrase. Only an acknowledgement, really. But it's the most she's gotten out of him yet.

And he does, he does know he's doing everything he can. Like always, though, it's just not good enough.

. . .

After arriving at the _Knight's Inn_ motel, Dean and Claire spend the rest of the day shopping and creating fake IDs, which, given everything, probably makes it the most ordinary day they have spent together.

"You could have been a counterfeiter in another life," she tells him as they sit on one of the beds, photos and tools fanned out around them. She sits cross-legged against the headboard, while he's sitting upright on the edge.

"In another life, I wouldn't have had to counterfeit," he responds.

He hands her her shiny, new FBI badge. "Here, Agent Currie. You'll be cutest FBI agent there ever was," he drawls. The adjective he uses is complimentary, but somehow the statement as a whole doesn't end up sounding like a compliment.

Still, after hearing this she is sure her face is red and determined not to make eye contact with him. Instead, she stares intently at the photo; he's right to point out that she doesn't really pull off the title. But she can't help but feel pleased. This – them here, in yet another dodgy motel room, poring over falsified documents – resembles something of a backwater initiation ceremony.

They then head over to a nearby department store, where the men nod at Dean in commiseration and the female sales clerks look at Claire in envy. It's odd and makes them both feel uncomfortable. She buys a cheap-but-professional-looking blouse, blazer, skirt, and shoes, before they get out of there as swiftly as possible.

It's around dinnertime when they're done, so they stop at a diner on the way back. Dean orders a cheeseburger. Claire orders a Caesar salad with fries on the side (which, by the way, he doesn't understand at all – don't they cancel each other out?). Even in such a short of amount of time, they've stumbled into some semblance of a routine.

It was different with Sam. Of course this goes without saying, but it is at times like this that it truly strikes him. With Sam, things just flowed. On hunts, they operated as one cohesive entity. There was always this sense that even if they decided to separate, they would find each other again, like magnets, even if they didn't want to. They shared a purpose – whatever it may be – and were bonded to it, by it, in every way possible. Joined at the soul.

Claire is a stranger he's teamed up with for purpose_s_, because she has hers and he has his and although they are related they re not the same, and this is brutally different. There is a barrier of uncertainty between them. Every action requires communication, every plan an explanation.

Right now, he feels like a veteran cop who has lost his lifelong partner and whose Captain decided to replace him with a rookie. Obviously, Claire pales in comparison. Anyone would. And that's the trouble.

"Tomorrow we'll go to the morgue," Dean tells her. His tone is so casual that an innocent bystander might have thought he was mentioning the weather forecast.

"Okay."

"And when we find this thing…" he starts gravely, "You let me take care of it. Hell, I shouldn't even be taking you."

"I've come this far, haven't I?"

"Yeah, but until now we haven't seen any action." He seems almost disappointed by this, like he longs for it. Maybe he does. Maybe he feels like he's missing a part of himself when he's not hunting. It's been so many years.

What Sam had wanted for him was a dream. It was never a sustainable concept – _never_. He would grow restless and he would leave. Nothing about him is domestic and nothing about him is functional. How could he ever thrive in an environment built for a different species? He could try. He might have tried. But if the door to the cage were open, what would stop him from leaving? In the end he knew he would disappoint more people, let them down just like he lets everyone down. That nameless thing inside him would scratch at the wall, fight to get out, until he couldn't hold it back anymore. The hunting feeds the beast, and without it he would be lost. He hates to admit it but it's true, and he wishes it weren't but it is. There's no more room for dreams.

"I know how to use a gun," she says matter-of-factly, rousing him from these thoughts.

"You do?"

"Yeah. Like I said, my dad was ex-military and… so was my brother. He had a bunch of guns and used to take us on hunting trips as kids."

Dean's eyebrows lift in apparent surprise, but he doesn't say anything. A seed of curiosity about her brothers has taken hold in him, but he hasn't pried, and in any case if you asked him he would deny that he cared.

"I know I don't look like much, but my dad taught me a thing or two." In all honesty, these hunting trips were more for her brothers' sake than hers – he took her along mainly because she was the oldest and insisted on being included. Her interest in the sport had always been tepid and once she entered high school she stopped going with them altogether. But still, she remembers how to shoot.

"That's good, I guess. But I hope you never have to prove it."

. . .

The next morning, when Claire emerges from the bathroom, Dean eyes her scrupulously. After a moment of sincere contemplation, he instructs, "You should put your hair up."

She glances at herself in the mirror, before deciding he's probably right – it'll make her look a bit older. Who would have thought Dean Winchester had such an eye for detail? She pulls her long locks tightly into a ponytail.

"Better," he grunts.

There was no vision last night. Neither of them mentions it, but it's one of those things that has a strong presence even if it's unspoken. She can tell Dean is curious, but is treading carefully in light of his recent outburst.

The visions come less when she is with him, she thinks. She knows Castiel said it should have no effect on them, but some nagging feeling inside the pit of her stomach is telling her he was wrong. This, if it's true, is better for her but worse for him. She's not going to bring it up.

Immediately upon entering the police department, Claire and Dean flash their badges at the officer working the front. He's not young (if his male-pattern baldness is any indication of age), but he doesn't quite look old enough to see through their bullshit.

"Agents Richards and Currie," Dean says. "FBI. We're here look at the bodies that were found in the woods."

"The animal attacks? Why the hell's the Bureau interested in that?"

"This is a highly classified investigation, officer," he says with an air of utter confidence. His voice dips an octave, to a comically low pitch. "I suggest you let us do our jobs." To Claire, it's obvious that he's pulling this out of his ass, but the officer apparently believes him.

"Suit yourselves," he replies, shrugging. "But you'll see – people are callin' it the Jersey Devil, but there's nothing that coulda done that other than a bear or something."

He leads them down to the morgue and the coroner takes over. White lab coat and all, he pulls out the type of stainless steel drawer that Claire had always thought – _hoped_ – she would only see on TV. The body is covered with a sheet. The white linen indents over the area where the victim's abdomen is.

"This one was brought in just the other day," he says, nonchalantly taking a sip of the coffee. "The others are the same. We've got animal control out there looking for the thing as we speak. If you think a person could've done this, then I definitely want the Bureau involved."

Dean pulls back the sheet with a fluidity that suggests he's done it many times.

Claire has to turn away and wage a war with her gag reflex. The sight is so gruesome the coroner does not even find this strange.

They instantly understand what the others had been talking about.

"I'll leave you to it," the coroner says, as if he's lost his appetite.

Dean's eyebrows knit in a scowl as he inspects the damage. The body belongs to a man of around thirty, and where there once was a stomach is now a bloody, cavernous mess. It's not _bloody_, bloody, in the sense of oozing blood, but bloody like a hunk of raw, rotting meat. And to Dean, who's seen some messed up shit before, it's apparent that things are _missing_. Not werewolf 'missing,' but, well, bear 'missing.'

He peers over at Claire, whose hand is clamped over her mouth and nose as she stares at the… carcass.

"You okay?"

"Yeah. Fine," is her muffled reply. Even though the sound is obfuscated, he detects sarcasm.

"Something definitely made a meal outta this dude," he observes.

"You think it's the thing we're looking for?"

"I'd put my money on it. These wounds were made with claws and teeth and whatever got 'im was hungry and not a bear."

"And now we go out looking for it in the woods?"

"Yep. Well, tonight anyway. Given when the bodies were found, this thing seems to be nocturnal."

"Peachy."

. . .

The nature reserve is especially chilly that night. Outside the Impala, Dean suits up in his dad's beat-up leather jacket and packs a bag of miscellaneous tools, while Claire mentally prepares herself. Going out into the forest in the dead of night to hunt something that's already eviscerated half a dozen of people was not something she was expecting to do on this journey.

There is something about the eerie stillness and scent of leaves that makes the woods at night feel like another dimension. Claire has always felt this way. Camping up north meant cold nights and clear stars, and a lot of time alone with her own thoughts. Now, the woods always make her think, and she suspects it is the same for other people. Dean gets this meditative-yet-melancholy look on his face when he thinks she can't see him.

Now is not a time for reflection. They march over trampled leaves, shotguns slung over their shoulders. Dean's hearing is tuned-in to every sound: the crunch of leaves, Claire's breathing, and everything else in between.

Two of the men killed were experienced hunters – that means this thing is fast. Dean wagers he's faster, but only if he keeps his wits about him.

The snap of twigs somewhere behind them causes him to spin around within a millisecond. His gun is lowered, so Claire follows his lead and does the same.

There's another rustle, this time from the treetops above. Dean redirects his aim. Again, she mimics him blindly.

"It's hunting us," he hisses to her. His eyes search the foliage, but it's too dark to see much and he doesn't have a free hand to use his flashlight.

There's a whooshing sound, and all of a sudden he feels something hot and moist by his ear. He barely has the time to get out a panicked _'fuck'_ before he's being hoisted into the air by his ankle. Claire lets out a shriek. The thing responds with a shriek of its own, an abominable cross between something human and something animal.

He is vaguely aware that warm, fresh blood from his ankle is trickling up his pant leg.

"Claire!" he yells. "Shoot!"

He figures there's a fifty-percent chance she'll miss and shoot him instead, but hell, when are the odds ever in his favor? Plus, it's just his foot that's in the direct line of fire. He'd rather live without his foot than become this thing's midnight snack.

To his (and her) immense astonishment, she shoots it in the face.

He falls out of its grasp and unceremoniously onto the forest floor, hard on his back. The creature falls nearby, a mess of blood and slime and – are those scales? Wings? There's definitely a tail in there… He can't tell exactly what it looks like in this light and the fall made him dizzy, but whatever it is, it's something straight out of someone's worst nightmares. So, the usual.

He unsteadily climbs to his feet with a groan. Ripples of pain are resonating through his back and his ankle smarts badly. The wound is just a scratch, but it's likely sprained from supporting his entire bodyweight. He'll be limping for a couple of days at least.

She runs over to him, eyes wide. "…Did I get it?"

He glances briefly at the lifeless heap not more than ten feet away from him. "You got 'im alright."

Her features morph into a shaky smile. She looks as though she's about to say something, but all of a sudden she's being snatched up by her ankle.

"Shit," he curses, diving for her fallen shotgun. He quickly rolls over on his abused back and aims for the head. He pulls the trigger without hesitation – you might have thought he was shooting a clay pigeon instead of some hellish, winged monster. The creature drops abruptly out of the sky, hitting a bunch of branches on its way down. Claire falls with it, incurring injuries similar to Dean's.

He hobbles over to her and helps her up. She looks a mess – her hair has become host to an array of twigs, her face is dirty, and she has a bleeding cut above her right eyebrow. He's sure he looks similar.

"Do you think there are more?" she immediately questions, looking around wildly.

"I don't think so. Body count hasn't been high enough."

"Are you sure they're dead?"

His gaze flits to the motionless bodies on either side of them. "Oh, they're dead alright. Headshot usually does the trick."

"What now?"

"We gotta bury 'em. These bodies are gonna be hard for anyone to explain."

They grab couple of shovels out of the bag Dean has brought with him, but Dean does the vast majority of the work. Once the monsters are good and buried under six feet of earth (those bastards were _heavy_), they limp back to the Impala. He is at least fortunate that the bastard didn't get his driving foot.

In the motel, Dean immediately insists on patching Claire's ankle up, seemingly oblivious to his own injury.

'Patching up' consists of dumping some whiskey on the wound, slapping a bandage on it, and hoping for the best.

"You're lucky you don't need stitches, but this is gonna sting," he prefaces as she sits on the edge of the bathtub. He's kneeling next to her with his hodgepodge of makeshift medical supplies.

She bites her lip and nods him the go-ahead. She lets out a hiss of pain when he pours the stream of whiskey over the gouge, but it's over fast.

"All set," he tells her, washing off the excess blood and liquor. He's acutely aware of her eyes on him as he wraps her ankle, and she is acutely aware of his fingers brushing her bare skin.

"Thanks," she says, standing with her good leg.

"No problem." He takes a swig from the bottle before rolling up the bottom of his jeans and giving his own ankle the same treatment.

When they're both cleaned up, Claire takes a moment to survey their impact on the room. It's completely trashed. There are enough bloody towel piled up in the corner of the bathroom to implicate a homicide, and filthy tools and clothes are scattered everywhere.

"I don't think we're gonna get that deposit back," she observes wryly.

Dean smirks, but instead of responding says, "You did good back there." His tone is clipped, but she gets the sense that any praise at all from him is high praise.

"I think it was mostly luck."

"In this job, luck is hard to come by."

They lock gazes, perhaps inadvertently, for what feels like an eternity. Everything Claire had been thinking about before rushes out of her head; if she wanted to reply, she's forgotten what she wanted to say.

Dean is the one who breaks eye contact. "I'm going out for a bit," he says.

"It's the middle of the night…"

"There's something I gotta do."

"Okay."

She doesn't ask where he's going – she has no reason to. She would normally assume a bar, but given his current state she's not so sure.

Nevertheless, it would shock her to know he is headed to a church. Desperate times and all that…

It's a small, white church, nearly identical to the thousands of others he's seen across the country. In the night's bluish hue, its looming, pointed steeple looks more sinister than holy. But this is not why Dean approaches it with hesitance.

He hadn't anticipated the church being locked – it didn't occur to him that not everything operates on the 24-hour schedule he has grown accustomed to.

It's not until he tries to open the doors and hears chains rattling on the inside that he realizes his mistake. Suddenly and unexpectedly he is overwhelmed – it all hits him at once. His ankle is hurting like a bitch, his body is completely covered in bruises and scratches, and he still isn't any closer to finding Sam.

He falls to his knees, bracing himself against the large wooden doors, and looks to the dark, cloudy sky.

"Please, Cas," he whispers, voice breaking. "I know you're real busy, but I need your help. Sammy's in trouble and I – I, I'm tryin', but I can't… It's not enough. _Please_…"

Dean's prayer resounds through the empty churchyard, a murmur among the chirping of early morning birds.

The birds are the only ones who answer.

* * *

**A/N: Please let me know what you think :)**


	7. Manic Depression

**A/N: Thank you soooo much to ImpalaLove and toridw17 for reviewing! I'm thrilled that you like the story so far and I hope you will continue to enjoy it!**

**Song: Manic Depression by Jimi Hendrix**

* * *

**CHAPTER 7**

**Manic Depression**

"Ya got it? Was it really the Jersey Devil?" Bobby interrogates from over the phone the next morning.

"It was some sorta devil," Dean mumbles in response. "Now, what's the name of that psychic?"

"She's called Lydia Allen. Cas ain't answerin'?"

"No," he replies sharply. Even from across the motel room, Claire can hear a deep note of hurt ring in his voice. She acts like she doesn't notice as she clicks away on her computer.

"Well, you can try her. She puts on a show and there's a lot of fanfare and the like, but don't let that throw ya – she's the real thing."

"Okay. Thanks Bobby."

"O'course. Good luck, son."

Without further ado, Bobby hangs up. Dean holds the phone in his hand a beat longer than necessary, staring pensively at the screen. If he were truly Bobby's son, he wouldn't be in this mess right now.

"Want me to book the flight to Las Vegas?" Claire asks from behind her screen. She's perked up immediately at the mention of a psychic.

"Flight? Who said anything 'bout a flight?" he backtracks.

She crinkles her nose in confusion. "How else would we get there?"

"Driving, obviously."

"All the way to Vegas?!"

"Uh huh."

She quickly opens Google Maps and plugs in their route. "That's a thirty-seven hour drive!"

"Is it?" he dismisses, shoving his clothes into his bag.

"Why can't we just fly?"

"No flying," he barks warily. "Plus, I sure as hell ain't leaving the car here."

Claire studies his expression closely, before an idea sprouts in her brain. "Are you – you're not… Are you afraid of flying?"

He snorts out a laugh a little too quickly. "What? No, don't be stupid." He pretends like the idea is ludicrous, but it's undeniable – he's flustered.

Her face breaks into an uncharacteristically sly grin. "You _are_, aren't you?"

"No," he insists, averting his line of sight. "Absolutely not."

"Yeah, okay tough guy…"

"Pack your stuff up," he orders dryly, clearly unamused.

. . .

Dean discovers (perhaps too late) that, from the outside, they must look like a couple in an abusive relationship. People actually _glared_ at him at breakfast this morning, as though they couldn't see that he was injured too, and they stared at Claire like they felt sorry for her. He never got anything even close to those looks with Sam.

Barring just that, he is more eager than ever to heal up. This whole gimp ankle thing is getting old real quick; he and Claire are hobbling around like pirates on peg legs. He could almost find it funny, if it weren't him.

It's been around a week since they've been on the road together. It feels like longer, but he wagers spending virtually every moment of every day with someone will give that impression. There are no more awkward silences, really, just cessations of conversations. After a the whole warming-up period of their partnership, he soon found that Claire likes to talk more than Sammy ever had, but even she needs a break sometimes.

To be entirely honest, Dean doesn't mind the chatting. He thought he would, but he doesn't. He thinks maybe this is because it prevents him from stewing in his own misery.

She doesn't really say anything too deep, which he appreciates. Mostly they talk about music or their day-plan or movies. Their pasts never come up – _never_. It's a topic that's meticulously avoided, actually. He'd be lying if he said he isn't curious. Questions burn on his lips, questions about her brothers, about the pills, about why she moved back to that Podunk town in Illinois. He suspects these things are all related, tied together by one catastrophic event. Usually that's the way it goes. But as much as the curiosity haunts him, he can respect her desire not to discuss it. After all, she doesn't ask him about the horrors she knows he's endured, so he can at least return the favor.

"What's you favorite band of all time?" she asks him on their way through Pennsylvania.

"That's easy. Zepp, of course," he answers matter-of-factly.

"They're good, I'll give you that," she agrees. "It's hard to choose just one, but I think I'm between them and the Stones. The Stones are still going strong."

"That's not necessarily a good thing. You know what they say about quitting while you're ahead? No one wants to listen to a bunch of old dudes wailing out songs that were written twenty years ago."

"They obviously care more about their fans, though."

"So? It's about the music."

"I guess…"

After a moment, he says, "I wouldn't have pegged you as a classic rock junkie."

"I get that a lot. You acquire a taste for it when you're exposed to it enough, I s'pose. I like most music."

"Not me," he scoffs. "That Top 40 shit they play on the radio all the time? Makes me wanna puke. It's just the same thing over and over again. I don't know how people's brains aren't melting from constantly listening to that garbage."

"You're such a snob."

He lets out a short chuckle. "Funny, that's not something I ever thought I'd be accused of."

"Well, you are. Some of it's not bad."

"If you say so…" he grumbles, clearly unconvinced. Sam used to say the same thing, but he never believed him, either.

When you're trapped in a car with someone for fifteen hours a day, it's hard not to learn a lot about them, even if you don't want to. For instance, he knows Claire's favorite color is green and her favorite drink is a Tequila Sunrise (he rolled his eyes at this one). He knows she used to watch Friends religiously and is still obsessed with it and he knows she'll make fun of him for watching Dr. Sexy MD but is secretly just as addicted to it as he is. He knows her dad taught her to drive when she was fourteen and that she broke her leg in a sledding accident in the fifth grade. In sum, he knows a lot of random shit. But he still doesn't know either of her brothers' names.

Then there's the other thing…

As crass as it may be to say, Dean legitimately cannot remember ever having spent so much time with the same girl, and he is absolutely positive that he's never spent so much time with the same girl and not slept with her. He expected all the girly crap without any of the perks to get annoying, but no – she's certainly not the whiny, needy harpy he'd been conditioned to believe most girls were. Maybe he has been wrong all along, maybe they all have. Plus, even if he's not testing the merchandise, there's no harm in having a bit of eye-candy around. She's certainly better to look at than Sam ever was.

To be entirely frank, though, it's getting to be distracting. He hasn't gotten laid in close to a month (which, for him, is like a year), and there's this long-legged, ever-present redhead flouncing around. They're practically joined at the hip, and not at all in the way he wants. And unfortunately, he doesn't really think she'd be cool with him bringing chicks back to the motel room. He's been taking a lot of cold showers.

He hasn't tried anything with her. They're stuck together until he can find a way to get Sam back – which could be a long time – and he sure as hell doesn't want to be spending that time with a woman scorned. Better just to avoid it altogether, he thinks. She seems to be on the same page.

. . .

The motel du jour is in Ohio. Dean likes Ohio, always has. It reminds him of home.

Nevertheless, he can't sleep, so he researches Purgatory on Claire's computer while nursing a glass of scotch. The blue glow from her computer begins to hurt his eyes as soon as the alcohol begins to invade his bloodstream.

Claire is sleeping, fitfully. His ears pick up the rustling of sheets nearby, the sound of her tossing and turning. He thinks he hears her mumble a word – _Chucky_, was it? – into her pillow, but he can't be sure. When it's so quiet like this, he sometimes thinks his ears play tricks on him. He sometimes thinks he hears Sam's voice in the static.

By this point, he's dying to know what happened to Claire's brothers. When he first met her he couldn't have given less of a shit about it, but now he _needs_ to know. In every story she tells they're there in the background, silent-but-lurking presences, like ghosts that exist only in her memory.

He doesn't really talk about Sam, either. He talks about him in the sense that they're looking for him, but he doesn't talk about him before, when he was younger, when _they_ were younger, when they were together. He doesn't mention that Fourth of July of '96, or that time in Alabama when Sam fell asleep with gum in his mouth they had to shave his whole head in the morning. But he thinks about these things constantly.

Dean is savvy enough to know that whatever happened to her brothers was nasty business and left an equally nasty scar, just like she knows that what happened with Sammy fucked him up real bad. She knows more about him than he knows about her, though, even if the details are sketchy. She knows about Detroit.

Sometimes, in their idle conversations, she touches on something more profound, digs just deep enough to scratch the surface.

Driving through Indiana the next day, she asks, "Did you always want to do this?"

"Whaddyou mean?"

"The hunting," she clarifies.

Dean sighs loudly, but humors her. "I always used to think so," he admits. "But now it's not something I want to do so much as something I have to."

She doesn't bother questioning this because she can see that it's true. More softly, she asks, "You never wanted to settle down, have a family?"

"Nah. I had a family…" he murmurs sadly. "You can't just replace that with a new one." He's not sure if this is a lie or not, but it's the easiest response – it's certainly not a lie to say he's too hung up on his past to ever have a functional life in the future. A wife, kids, the whole shebang – it might be nice, but it wouldn't dull the pain of losing everyone else. It would be a Band-Aid, not a cure. He is incurable.

Claire wants to push against this, but she doesn't. Dean can at first seem like a testosterone-fueled douchebag, but she's quickly finding that this is just a front, a shield he's built for himself. He's a good guy with a kind heart, and he seems like he would want a family of his own.

"What about you? Even before, you didn't seem like you were on the fast-track to becoming a soccer mom any time soon."

"I always thought I would, once I met the right person. Now I think that's probably out of the cards, though."

He shrugs. "You never know. Some nice boy back in Illinois might change your mind," he baits, only half-serious.

"I think the whole prophet thing is probably a deal-breaker."

"I don't think you're giving people enough credit. Sure, it might scare some off, but there'll always be a few who understand. You're here, aren't you?"

"Maybe once I find a way to deal with it…"

"…Speaking of the whole prophet thing –"

"I know," she cuts him off. "I don't know why they've been so infrequent." But this isn't entirely honest. She does, or at least she has a theory.

"You haven't had one in days," he tells her, as if she isn't already fully aware of this.

"Yep. Maybe it's just because nothing's changed with him."

Dean's expression is vexed, like he doesn't believe her. But he either doesn't want to say anything else or doesn't know what else to say. He doubts it would be appropriate to encourage her to get wasted again, so he just focuses on the road.

. . .

_All those times he called Hell 'the Pit,' he hadn't been referring to this._

_The earth – the very fabric of reality – splits, crumbles, caves in on itself. It opens up into an abyss, a pit wholly and truly. _

_He knows Hell. He knows the heat, the flames, the red glow of fire casting shadows on cave walls, playing out scenes of torture like macabre pantomimes. He remembers the silhouettes, the figures carrying their own heads instead of vases. The music is an orchestra of screams and laughter._

_This is not that. This is blackness, this is nothingness. Hell is a terrible, awful, excruciating, and above all alternate state of being – this is an end. This is death._

"_It's okay, Dean. It's gonna be okay."_

_Their whole lives they have been telling each other it was going to be okay, knowing it was a lie._

_He has seen this look of raw, utter fear many times before, but never on his brother._

_Sam falls back into the void. He wants to chase him, to jump in after him, to have the world swallow him up too. But his legs are rubber and he can feel fragments of bone floating in blood just underneath the skin of his face. It is a miracle he is still conscious._

_He's sees Michael – no, Adam, their brother – tumble in after him and envies him. He should be the one running after him, the one dying with Sam. He always thought he would be, one way or another. If he can't pluck him out, he should go out with him. He's his big brother, after all, and if anyone's gonna follow him down the rabbit hole it oughtta be him. _

_It could have been him; it should have been him. He fucked it up, changed the script. He did this to himself._

_After all, they are just pieces on a board, like Sammy said – no, that was Lucifer._

_And in any case, he was wrong._

Dean and Claire jerk awake at the exact same moment. They look at one another, their eyes filled with a parallel mixture of terror and physical pain.

Maybe she's out of practice, but Claire thinks this is the worst one yet.

She breaks eye contact almost as soon as she is fully aware of what is happening and doubles over in agony. She's barely fast enough to make it to the bathroom, before she heaves the contents of her stomach into the toilet.

Dean starts out of bed, unsure of whether he should follow her or give her her privacy.

"Computer," she groans in command.

Happy to have a direct order, he quickly scoops up her laptop and brings it to her.

"It's like having a concussion," she tells him as she types out his nightmare. He reads the words as they hit the page and feels weak.

She, on the other hand, _looks_ weak. He rubs her back while she purges herself of the vision, and it's too late to stop once he realizes what he's doing. When she's done, she slides the computer away from her with a zealous hatred. It hits the baseboard on the other side of the room with a solid thud.

And then there they are, kneeling on the cold tile floor of a Kansas motel bathroom. She slumps against him out of sheer weariness and he keeps his arms around her because he doesn't know what else to do. They don't speak. They are inconsolable.

After a minute or so, she stands and begins to brush her teeth. He heads back to his bed, but it would be a farce to pretend he can sleep. When the nightmares are about Sam – _truly _Sam, not Lucifer – is when it's the hardest. It was not Lucifer who fell into that pit. It was his brother.

When she's finished, she stands in the doorway to the bathroom and he can only see the outline of her body. The light filters in from behind, darkening the part of her that is facing him. He wracks his brains to think of something reassuring to tell her, but it's all black in there. He comes up empty-handed.

She's silent as she strides forward and shoves her bed directly up against his.

"What're you –"

"It's okay," she interrupts, as if it explains everything.

As bad as that was for her, it was he who'd lived it.

He freezes as she crawls into their now-double bed, on top of the covers. Both his mind and his body are paralyzed, rigid in shock and apprehension, but all his nerves are screaming at him to do something, anything. Still, he is completely unmoving as she scoots closer, until she is lying on her side next to him and their faces are only inches apart.

It is odd for them to see each other like this, so close. She can see every single detail in his face, and he in hers.

She puts a hand on his bicep. It doesn't touch bare skin, but he can feel the heat of her seeping through his short sleeve. "I'm sorry," she says. "I'm sorry that that happened."

Dean doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. After all that, all she says is _I'm sorry_.

She continues, "I understand more than you think."

Now, he wouldn't talk even if he could.

"I used to have two brothers," she says, like she is beginning a fairytale. "They were a little like you and Sam, but not exactly. Their names were Ryan and Charlie."

Their eyes are locked intently. Blue and green. Tethered together. It could have been romantic, but it isn't. The context is all wrong.

"Ryan was the older one, only a couple of years younger than me. Everyone called him the golden child – he was sweet, athletic, pretty much perfect all around, especially if you asked my dad. Charlie was around four years younger than him, so six years younger than me. Charlie was the black sheep – this sensitive, quiet bookworm. Even as a baby, he never really seemed happy. That's how it is with some people, you know? It's just… It's in their bones."

_It's in their blood_.

"But he loved Ryan – adored him. He was the only person who really seemed to get him, even though they were polar opposites. It could've been bad – Ryan was a jock and Charlie was this brooding little kid – but it wasn't. Ryan was such a happy-go-lucky guy that he made everyone around him smile, even sullen little Charlie."

She has this nostalgic look on her face, and Dean feels a dagger go through his heart. He registers something abruptly: there's no going back from this. They are bonded.

Claire had always thought you never truly know someone until you're up all night talking to them. She supposes she and Dean know each other now, which is why he needs to know the Story.

"Anyway," she elaborates, "Once Ryan graduated high school, he decided to join the army. At that time I was in college and I told him he should go too, but our family didn't have a ton of money and he didn't want to go through the hassle of loans and all that, so he didn't listen. I was lucky because I was the oldest, you see. They had enough money to put me through. Even if we could've afforded it, I still think he would've enlisted – he'd always wanted to, to be like my dad, to make him proud. So Ryan joined up, and a year later we got the call. He was killed in Iraq. IED. Everyone took it hard, but Charlie took it especially hard."

She pauses, tears flowing freely down her face at this point. He finally gathers the resolve to touch her, slinging one arm over her waist so that they are in a sort of halfhearted embrace.

"Charlie – Charlie was only a sophomore in high school when it happened. Fifteen. He was so young," she chokes out. "He couldn't – he didn't – maybe if I'd been there he wouldn't have…"

She seems like she might be about to stop, so he takes her hand in his other one, tightly, urging her to continue.

"He killed himself a few months later. He took one of my dad's hunting rifles and put it in his mouth. He had been in this dark place forever, it seemed, and no one thought anything of it – that was just the way he was, the way he'd always been. Sure, he was worse, but it was the same for all of us."

She swallows heavily. "I majored in psychology, though. They say it's genetic – my mom's brother hung himself. It's in my family – it was in him, in all of us, maybe. It's this disease. I had just graduated and I had moved out, so I wasn't around. But maybe if I'd come back sooner, I could have… I didn't think, but…"

"Stop," Dean interrupts passionately, his own eyes mutinously starting to water. "Stop. That's not on you."

"I should have known," she insists. "He was my baby brother. Even when it happened, he was still just a kid. A late bloomer, you know? He was still cute, in that half-grown sort of way. He had red hair like me and – and all these freckles. The other kids used to tease him, I think, call him names. But I always thought it made him look… innocent."

He remembers Sam at fifteen. It was the same – baby-faced and gangly limbed. This strikes him, this convergence of innocence and contamination. It's hard to come to terms with the notion that some tragedies might happen no matter what – they're fated. He still hasn't quite accepted it. The thought of a fifteen year old taking a gun to his own head makes his gut wrench. It is appalling, in the deepest sense of the word. It is wrong. It can't be right, even if it's written into the script.

"When he was little, sometimes he used to call me 'mom' by accident. I took care of him. I took care of him in ways even Ryan didn't. Ryan was the buddy, but I was the one he came to when he was sick or hurt or anything like that. I should have known…"

"Claire," he says firmly, "It's not on you."

"I loved him so much," she goes on. "I loved Ryan too, obviously, but Charlie was almost like my own kid. He didn't know what he was doing. His big brother died, and he just reacted. I know he loved me, but it wasn't enough – whatever he felt for Ryan was stronger."

"Claire…"

"You know how it is," she says through a tearful laugh. "Little siblings – you're supposed to protect them, but –"

"I know."

"I just wish I could go back and –"

"I know."

She wriggles herself closer, clinging to him and burying her face in his t-shirt. She weeps, and he holds her because there is nothing else he can do.

"That's why I went home," she states once she regains some semblance of control over her emotions. "It destroyed my parents, and I wanted to make sure the disease didn't get them too."

She tries to wipe her face as though she is ashamed, but he catches her wrist. They are far past this now. He brushes the tears away with his thumb.

"I'm sorry," she sniffs, looking away. "This was years ago."

"Don't be." He more than anyone knows that time does not heal all wounds.

"I just wanted you to understand – I get it. And I want to help you find Sam, I do. I know what it's like to live without a part of yourself, and if there were a way I could get my brothers back I would want all the help I could get."

"Yes, I understand. Thank you. I'm glad you told me, and I'm so, so sorry."

There it is again. _I'm sorry._ It's what you say when words fail you.

He rests his chin atop her velvety head and pulls her against him. Her hair smells like fruit and he wishes this didn't have to be so depressing. But still, it feels safe to have someone to touch, to be close to. On the surface he is comforting her, but in actuality it is not so clear-cut. Her story hurts him, too, because he understands the dynamic in a way that perhaps even she does not. The desire to follow someone into death is not a feeling you can comprehend unless you yourself have felt it. But perhaps the incomprehensibility of it makes it particularly painful. He doesn't know.

They drift into a shallow sleep like this, and when they wake the next morning they feel much better.

* * *

**A/N: I'm sorry that was so dark! The next chapter will be lighter, I promise! I tried to mix up the Claire and Dean perspectives so that it wasn't too much of one of them. I hope you guys like Claire, I'm working hard not to make her too over the top - I want her to be a believable character. And I know I said this is a romance - and it is - but I think that for Dean, the physical part is easy. Kissing her or whatever would be easy. It's the stuff like this that would be a step for him, in my opinion.**

**Please let me know what you think!**


	8. Sin City: Part 1

**A/N: As always, thank you so so so much to toridw317, ImpalaLove, and rosesapphire16 for reviewing! You guys are awesome! I hope everyone enjoys this chapter.**

**Song: Sin City by AC/DC**

* * *

**CHAPTER 8**

**Sin City: Part 1**

Everything is a bit murky, now. That night in Kansas left them… confused. It's not awkward between them – not exactly.

To Dean, Claire suddenly seems more… real. More multi-faceted, he supposes. She's no longer some girl he's saddled with because he needs to find his brother. Because of this, he can feel the roots of attachment begin to treacherously take hold in his chest, and it fills him with a distinct sense of dread.

Dean has a hard time with intimacy. There is his family – only Sam, now – and there are the girls. There is no overlap between emotional and physical relationships, or at least there hasn't been for a very long time. He has kept it this way for a reason, because this is how it needs to be. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, they say.

He does not have a physical relationship with Claire, but the boundaries have blurred. He has urges, urges that betray his fastidiously implemented dichotomy. These urges would be fine on their own, but coupled with their friendship are problematic. He doesn't know how to deal with them. His whole view of her has been disrupted, and this makes him feel things he never wanted to feel.

Claire feels terrified. Now that she's spilled her guts to him, she's vulnerable. She doesn't think he would hurt her, at least not intentionally, but he has the power to. Very few people outside of her family know the Story. Telling him was an act of trust, the most profound act of trust. She trusts him not to mention it unless she brings it up herself. She is not as strong as he is – he can handle questions about Sam, about what happened. He hates them, but he can handle them. She can't. She can't talk about it. She told him the Story once, and she can't do it again.

When they woke up tangled in each other's limbs, they acted like nothing out-of-the-ordinary had occurred. The only difference in behavior was that Dean now looked at her with that particular sort of clarity she'd caught a glimpse of before, and she treated him with more reluctance. It was bizarre. Oddly, Dean might have been more comfortable with the situation better if they had hooked up – he has his one-night-stand procedure down to a science. But this… this emotional exorcism thrust him into dangerous and uncharted waters. They were friendly before, but now it is different.

One thing was for certain – they could think about it all they wanted, but they sure as hell weren't going to talk about it.

. . .

They make it to Las Vegas without incident.

Dean had always _loved_ Vegas, but somehow (and to his own consternation) he discovers he has grown to hate it. It's the city that unites his dream-team of vices: gambling, booze, and women. It had always been a place where – once a year – he could completely immerse himself in his favorite acts of debauchery and forget all the shit that was dragging him down in life. But now, he can only think that this place is not the same without his brother's nagging and general stuck-up disapproval. It's not fun to throw yourself into hedonism if there's no one trying to pull you out of it. Without a Jiminy Cricket – without _Sam_ – the thought of rolling in strippers and alcohol and poker chips just feels dirty and pathetic. Because if you don't have someone to drag you out when it's time to go, you'll never leave.

Their first order of business is to locate Lydia Allen, which Claire does on her computer.

"It must be our lucky day," she tells Dean wryly as he paces the motel room. "She's putting on a show at a hotel tonight."

"Awesome. So what, we meet her backstage afterwards and tell her Bobby sent us?"

Claire shrugs, taken aback. "I don't know – you're the one calling the shots, remember?"

"Right…" he murmurs to himself. For an instant, he forgot he wasn't working with Sam. He buries this deep. "That's what we'll do."

They're jammed right in the middle of the city, and it's hot. It's a dry heat, creeping and heavy, and the air feels dense. This is not a motel like all the others – they are one of the top floors in a multi-story building, and there's no air conditioning. All the windows are open and they can hear the unfamiliar sounds of a bustling city bleed in, along with the stench of the street. There's a fat, dying black fly caught between the screen and the bit of window that's not all the way raised. It's futile buzzing cuts above the din of car horns and public transportation and even the woman yelling in Spanish in the apartment directly across the alley from them. It's amazing, Dean thinks, that such a thing can happen. It has the entire world at its disposal, and yet it found the smallest and most insignificant corner of it to trap itself in.

"Do we have to dress up for this?" he questions abruptly, pushing any quasi-philosophical musings out of his mind.

"Maybe a little. It's at a pretty nice place."

"I dunno what that means," is his blunt response.

Claire rolls her eyes. "Let me see what you have," she says, reaching for his duffle.

"You wanna go through my stuff?" he questions incredulously.

"No, I don't want to 'go through your stuff,'" she replies in exasperation, "I just want to see your clothes. I'm trying to help."

"Listen, I ain't exactly got what you would call a diverse wardrobe. We don't need to turn this into fashion week."

"Just let me see," she persists, starting to unzip his bag.

Now it's his turn to roll his eyes. "Fine. Whatever," he snorts in obvious annoyance. He doesn't really have anything to hide, so he surfs the Web as she scrounges through his clothes.

Eventually she states, "You weren't kidding when you said you didn't have much."

"Toldja," he answers without looking at her.

Nevertheless, she's laid out all his clothes on the bed and is scrutinizing them pensively. "Well, you definitely can't wear one of those flannel things you love so much… And it's hot, so you don't need that jacket you always wear. Come to think of it, you always wear some variation on the same exact thing…"

Dean could not be anymore uninterested in what she is saying. He'd just wanted to know if he was gonna have to wear a suit – he should have known he was opening Pandora's frickin' box.

Eventually she decides on his darkest of two pairs of jeans and a black V-neck tee that she's never seen him wear without another shirt over it. "This should be okay," she informs him, gesturing to the outfit.

"Awesome," he replies after granting her a millisecond of attention.

When they're both washed up and ready to go, Dean is wearing what Claire picked out for him and Claire is wearing a pair of dark-wash jeans and a blouse. She's also done her makeup in a way that she hasn't since he first met her, which is to say she is wearing makeup. He thinks it looks nice.

Dean announces, "I feel naked."

"Oh, shut up. You look good," she refutes objectively.

He smirks and quirks an eyebrow, like he doesn't need to be told this. She makes a face.

"You are so much," she complains.

"So much? So much what?" He appears to be genuinely confused.

"Never mind. Let's just go."

. . .

They buy their tickets in the hotel lobby and make their way to the auditorium. The room is incredibly dark apart from the stage, and it's hard to see much of anything. There seems to be a moderate crowd, but the fact that they were able to purchase tickets on such short notice doesn't really speak well for Lydia Allen's popularity.

They stumble through the dark to a small, round table with a maroon tablecloth and a dimly flickering candle on it.

The show has already started, but it's just the opening act – someone named Henry Hex. He has carrot-orange hair that's clearly dyed and is wearing a purple velvet tuxedo. He's a bona-fide clown, as far as Dean is concerned, and his performance is a circus act. He earns a feeble applause from the audience, and between his set and Lydia's a couple of waitresses come by to take drink orders.

"I'll have a whiskey, neat," Dean says expertly. The waitress is a pretty blonde, like so many of the others, and Claire notices – for the first time since they've been on the road together – he doesn't undress her with his eyes. In fact, he hardly even spares her a glance.

"I-I'll have a vodka soda," Claire says after the blonde watches her expectantly for several moments. "Should we be drinking on the job?" she hisses across the table once she's gone.

"Have you been paying attention _at all_?"

"Yeah, but it just seems… I don't know…"

"You were a _bartender_," he drawls. "You're telling me you never snuck a few on the clock?"

Before she can answer, a sultry, mystical tune fills the room, signaling the start of Lydia's act. The curtain lifts, revealing the main attraction.

Lydia is around fifty years old, but still beautiful. She is dark and statuesque, with waist-length dreadlocks woven together into an elaborate hairdo. This, compounded with her calico attire, gives her the appearance of a Voodoo priestess.

"Welcome, my friends," she purrs. Her voice is low and smooth, like silk; it doesn't sound like a voice so much as it does a melody. "Prepare to open your minds."

The performance included an extensive amount of audience participation. One chubby, middle-aged woman broke into tears when Lydia was allegedly able to communicate with her dead cat, and an elderly man fainted when she 'received' a message from his wife, who had been deceased for twenty years. They had to rush in the paramedics, but the man ended up being perfectly fine. While this occurrence in itself wasn't exactly humorous, Dean struggled to keep his snickering concealed for a large portion of the show. Claire kicked him in the shins under the table at least twice, when he was being particularly blatant in his disdain. And during at least one of these instances, Lydia looked directly at Dean with a knowing and unsettling twinkle in her eyes. And it certainly didn't help that the waitress kept refilling their drinks.

When it's over and the lights flip on, their retinas burn to adjust and their legs feel suddenly unsteady when they stand.

Dean doesn't seem at all affected by the alcohol, except for the fact that he has a mildly glazed look in his eye that doesn't at all match the gravity of his customary frown. Claire feels lightheaded for a second, but regains her bearings once she stops making sudden movements.

They find their way backstage, to an area that is extraordinarily bland when compared with the theatrical display they have just witnessed. Lydia's dressing room is sparsely furnished – just a vanity, some makeup, some lights, and some costumes. Her back is to them as she removes her gaudy gold earrings.

As they loiter in the doorway, she drawls, "Dean Winchester and Claire Shurley. Did you enjoy the show?"

"You know who we are?" he demands gruffly, giving no indication of his surprise.

She gracefully swivels around to face them. "Something told me you weren't here for an autograph… Of course I know who you are. People like you – a prophet and a Winchester – you make a big splash in the cosmic sphere, so to speak. And together – well, you might as well be wearing bells around your necks. I knew you were coming before you even left New Jersey, before Bobby Singer even gave you my name."

"So then you know why we're here?"

"I presume you are looking for the other half of the supernatural's most notorious duo."

"You think you can help?"

"That depends. What is it you would like to know?"

"We need to know where he is, and how to get to him."

"I can definitely help you with the first part," she starts, "but I am not certain about the second."

"Alright, well, let's go," says Dean, fidgeting impatiently.

"Not so fast. I'm tired – what you saw out there wasn't just smoke and mirrors, darling. My energy is drained – come see me tomorrow, at this address." She hands him a business card. "And bring something of your brother's. Something of emotional or spiritual significance," she adds. Her round, onyx-colored eyes bore into them, as to tell them they are dismissed.

"How did you know I was a prophet?" Claire blurts out.

She smirks slyly, in a way that is incredibly disconcerting. "I am more powerful than my career choice might suggest," she replies cryptically. "People have started talking since you've decided to team up with Blue Steel over here."

"Good or bad," he interrogates, ignoring the unsolicited nickname. Part of Claire almost wants to chuckle because he's wearing the exact expression Lydia was referencing.

"Both."

"So then you'll understand why I need your help, too," interjects Claire.

"Why, my child?"

"My visions. They're excruciating – I want to know if there is away to manage them."

She peers at her in a mixture of empathy and pity. "We can discuss that tomorrow as well."

* * *

**A/N: Sorry this one was so much shorter than usual! If I made the whole Vegas trip one chapter, though, it would be suuuper long, so I decided to break it up into two parts. And LOL this story was only supposed to be 10 chapters, but that's def not happening anymore. Let me know what you think! I hope you don't mind that this chapter was a bit fluffier than usual. Thanks for reading :)**


	9. Sin City: Part 2

**A/N: Thank you so much to toridw317 and ImpalaLove for reviewing! I hope everyone enjoys this chapter.**

**Song: Sin City by AC/DC**

* * *

**CHAPTER 9**

**Sin City: Part 2**

The address Lydia gave them brings them to a modest house just outside of the thrall of the city. It's one story, but sprawling, and there are plastic gnomes hammered into the lawn. Dean parks the Impala in the pitch-black driveway, behind her red Camry. With the look of a man on a mission, he walks around the back of the car and grabs something out of the rear door, shoves it into his jeans' pocket without looking at it, and joins Claire on the front step.

Claire rings the doorbell and Lydia appears; her flow-y, calico skirt from the night before has been replaced by a pair of white Capri's.

"Come in," she greets warmly, stepping aside to let them pass.

Claire can't help but think the décor in her house is suspiciously mundane as Lydia leads them to what appears to be her dining room. They sit around a square, light-colored wooden table that has a chair positioned on each side. Dean is wedged between Claire and Lydia.

"Now, who am I helping first?" she asks.

Claire and Dean lock eyes, unsure.

"Is there a way that she can learn to control the visions?" Dean questions after a moment of deliberation. He figures Claire's dilemma will be more quickly resolved than his, if indeed it can be.

"The key is to not fight them, my dear," she tells Claire. "You must let them wash over you – you must allow yourself to become engulfed by them. It is the resistance that causes the pain. If you feel one coming on, embrace it."

"I-I don't know how to do that," she stammers. "And I can't feel them coming on."

"Eventually you will learn to recognize the signs or triggers. For me, I get this feeling as though I am falling. It only lasts half-a-second, but once it happens I know what's coming next and I can prepare for it."

"But I don't just see things," Claire insists. "I have to write things down – it's all words."

Lydia's striking features contort into a frown. "That is odd. Perhaps if you speak the words until you can write them down it will lessen the pain."

Claire has never considered this, but it seems like an idea that is worth a try.

"I can see that these visions have caused you much pain," Lydia continues. "And I have been in a similar situation. We didn't ask for these gifts, but for whatever reason we were endowed with them. The sooner you accept this and come to embrace it, the sooner you can work to control them."

"Is there anything that affects how often the visions come?" Dean interjects.

"I've noticed that it is sometimes related to my emotional state," she answers. "If I am alone for long periods of time they tend to come more often, or if I'm doing anything that alters my state of mind. A lot of it has to do with my level of introspection, I would say."

This, in particular, resonates with Claire. It would explain why the visions are less frequent when she is with Dean.

"I get them a lot when I'm asleep," she states.

"Dreams are the ultimate form of introspection, dear."

"Sometimes I get the same dreams that he does, though."

She considers Dean with a stern expression. "The link between you and the Winchesters is unusual," she replies. "Joint dreaming indicates a very deep connection – perhaps even the deepest. I'm afraid that is where we differ. Psychics are not bound to anyone specific... Maybe there is some reason you are connected to them that you have yet to uncover."

Claire nods pensively.

"Now, shall we get on to the primary reason for this visit?" Lydia quirks one dark, sculpted eyebrow and extends her palm.

"Yeah," Dean says lamely. He fishes around in his pocket, eventually brandishing a small, green, plastic figurine – a toy soldier, and hands it to her without explanation. Claire assumes this is the item he had grabbed out of the backseat.

"This is your brother's?"

"Yeah," he repeats, a bit cagily.

Lydia adopts a look of curiosity, but doesn't ask for the back-story that is so clearly weighing on him. "We must join hands," she instructs, the cadence of her voice suddenly deeper and airier.

Casting Claire a look of wary disinclination, he nevertheless takes her hand in his and does the same with Lydia's. The ridges of Sam's totem poke into his palm, reminding him the first thing his brother laid eyes on when he broke Lucifer's hold on him.

When they are all connected by touch, Lydia's eyelids flutter closed.

"I invoke, conjure, and command thee, Sam Winchester, to appear unto me before this circle."

She chants this, six times.

The table begins to quake. Claire's grip on Dean's hand grows tighter.

"I invoke thee – Sam?"

This time, it's Dean who reflexively squeezes Claire's hand.

"Sam Winchester? Yes, your brother is here…" She chuckles softly. "No, it seems he didn't take your advice. No, there is someone else here, too – no, not Bobby. Claire Shurley, the prophet. Oh, you don't know her?"

"Ask him where he is!" Dean interrupts fiercely.

"He says he doesn't know."

"Ask him to describe it."

"He says its… It's a forest, there are monsters there – he says he must be dead, that they all are dead. He says that the monsters keep telling him he doesn't belong there, that humans don't belong there."

"How did he get there?"

"He doesn't know – he says he thinks it was a mistake. There is no one else like him there."

"Is it Purgatory?"

"Is it Purgatory, Sam?" she echoes. "He says he's not sure, but it might be. Yes, now he says he thinks it is. He says he doesn't think humans have access to it. He wants you to know, Dean, that he's all right, all things considered. He says it is a bit like a limbo, but it's not torture like Hell."

"Tell him I'm gonna get him out of there."

Lydia laughs again. "He says he knows. He also says that if he really is dead, maybe a reaper could get to him."

"A reaper? Ask him –"

"Oh no, I am sorry, Dean – he says he has to go now, but not to worry. He'll be all right until you find a way to get to him. He says he can hold the monsters off."

"But wait – "

Lydia's eyes fly open. "I'm sorry. He's gone."

Dean wrenches his hands away as though he has been burned, bringing one to scrub over his face.

Claire gingerly touches his shoulder. "This is good, right? He said he's okay."

"Yeah, but how the hell are we gonna find a reaper who'll help us?" he bites back.

"I don't know, but it's a start. At least now we have a direction to go in."

Lydia's eyes narrow and her gaze darts skeptically between the two of them. Eventually, she says, "I am surprised you did not see him, Claire."

"Why is that?"

Instead of answering her, she says, "I suppose this is another difference between a psychic and a prophet. A psychic connection can go two ways, but yours… Yours is one-sided. He couldn't reach out to you knowingly – whatever connection you have to him, it is entirely unknown to him. That, or you weren't trying."

She doesn't speak, not knowing what she would even say. Dean also appears perplexed by this declaration.

"_Oh-_kay," he says, standing. He needlessly brushes off the front of his jeans, peering down at Claire expectantly. She also stands.

"Thank you," he says gruffly to Lydia.

"Of course," she purrs. "And now that I've helped you, I'd say you owe me one."

"Oh yeah? What do you have in mind?"

"Nothing, at the moment. But you never know when an indebted Winchester might come in handy."

"Alright," he agrees. "I'll give you my number, and if you ever need anything just give me a call."

. . .

"What do you think she meant about that one-way connection thing?" Claire asks back at the motel room.

"I dunno, that was weird," he replies, scratching the back of his head. He takes a swig from his flask, before offering it to her.

She eyes it distastefully, but takes a sip all the same. Whiskey. It sears her tongue.

"I think she just likes the sound of her own voice," he adds after a moment. The edge of the bed sinks under his weight as he sits, mirroring her.

"Well, at least we got _some_ answers today," she tries.

"Yeah," he scoffs, taking another drink. "Some. I talked to Bobby an hour ago and he's on the hunt for rogue reapers. Hopefully he'll come up with something soon."

"So, we're on the right track," she says in an attempt to lift his spirits. Dean is perpetually down, even though what they had learned certainly could not be considered a setback.

She gets up from the bed, walking to stand directly in front of him. She grabs both is hands and tries to pull him up.

"C'mon," she says. "We're in Vegas. We got some good news. Let's just take a break from all the gloom and doom for one night. It's exhausting."

Dean allows himself to be hauled up, but still seems dubious. "What do you suggest?" he inquires dryly.

"Let's go out. Let's go to a bar or something. There are like twenty surrounding us – it's not like we have to go far."

"Fine," he breathes out, albeit begrudgingly. He's not in the mood to party, but the prospect of more alcohol is appealing. His flask has run out.

They make their way to a dive bar across the street. It's pretty seedy, like the rest of the area they are in, but everyone there is around their age. There's something akin to a dance floor in the back, and there's a throng of people sloshing their drinks around and swaying to whatever live band is playing.

Dean had not been in the mood to go out – not when everything in this goddamn city reminds him of his and Sam's annual pilgrimage – but he more than anyone understands the importance of not being a buzz-kill. So he intends to drink. Heavily. Until he's feeling less surly.

Having spoken with Lydia about her visions, Claire seems open to the opportunity to drink heavily as well. Indeed, when they enter the building they make a beeline for the bar.

Drink in tow, she shouts above the clamor, "See, isn't this better than sitting in the room and brooding?"

Dean has yet to make a judgment on this account, but humors her. "Sure," he concurs, forcing a smile.

But soon, he begins to find it harder and harder to maintain his bad attitude. The more she drinks, the more bubbly she becomes, and pretty quickly he discovers that she is – perhaps surprisingly – one of the happiest drunks he's ever encountered.

For the first time in his life, people leave him alone. He had never realized how big of a cockblock going to a bar with a chick could be, but he doesn't really care because the more he drinks the less Claire becomes Claire. And soon enough she's just a hot girl like all the others, and they're not talking about Sam or visions or Purgatory, but all the frivolous stuff people at bars talk to each other about.

"Let's do shots," she proposes at some point, and he agrees because she seems so adamant. By now the night is spiraling and he knows it's spiraling but he's having too much fun to pump the breaks.

So she orders tequila and the bartender lays out a row of amber-colored shots, along with a heap of salt and limes. After everything, it is surreal to see salt used in this context.

Dean gulps down three without flinching, only after the third coating a slice of lime in salt and popping it in his mouth. Watching his lips pucker around the sour fruit, Claire feels a rush of heat cascade through her stomach. Instead of reacting to it, she giggles and squeals, "You're supposed to have the lime first!"

He grins broadly. When he grins like this – genuinely smiles – the corners of his eyes crease and she finds him irresistible. He laughs, "Oh really? My bad… Here." He feeds her a lime that he has prepared in the same fashion and his fingertips brush her rose petal lips, lingering there perhaps longer than strictly necessary.

She throws back three shots of her own, but does not keep her composure nearly as well as he does. Scrunching her nose, she complains, "That was brutal." This seems to be the only time her smile falters, but he loves it when she makes that face. Somehow everything he had ever subconsciously liked about her becomes illuminated and the feeling magnified tenfold.

Another laugh escapes his lips. It's such a rare sound and she wants nothing more than to hear it over and over again, she herself experiencing some similar clarity of affection. An errant clump of salt is clinging to the corner of his mouth, and she unthinkingly wipes it away with her thumb. She maintains eye contact with him as her tongue darts out to clean the digit.

He can hardly believe what he is witnessing – he's half-sure he's seen this before in a porno. Arousal crawls up his bones.

He knows what to do with this feeling. It's pure instinct, perfected by years of trysts.

Gazing down at her through hooded eyes, he places his fingers on her lower back and suggests, "Do you think we should head back now?"

He's not thinking straight, he thinks. He's had so much to drink that even _he_ is drunk. That's the only explanation for this, this bizarre change in behavior. It has to be.

Claire is still wearing an ear-to-ear grin and acts completely oblivious to his underlying intent. "Not yet," she says, clutching his hand in her smaller one. "I want to dance."

And so she drags him to the dance floor. Dean doesn't dance, never has. But she is so beautiful, lost her in own world and somehow utterly free and happy, even after everything, that he wants to try. He wants to forget too and be someone else, someone who dances.

Whatever rhythm she is rocking to, it is not the same one that the band is playing. But he doesn't care. He finds it fairly easy to figure out how to do the type of 'dance' everyone else seems to be doing – it's a lot like sex. She grinds her hips into his and he grinds back. She grabs onto his shoulders for stability and because he's smiling that smile and it scrambles her insides.

Boy, does she grab him. She grabs him like she needs him, like she can't get close enough to him. Dean knows girls. He knows that when they do this they're begging to be touched, and so he does exactly that – he molds his fingers to her hips. They rock in the middle of the fray, clutching one another like this, warding off the horrors like this, for a little while.

Soon, she threads her fingers through the dark-blond locks at the back of his head and is surprised to find that his hair feels like silk. She almost wants to call him out on it, because who would have ever thought that _Dean Winchester_ has silky hair. She instantly suspects he's been using her shampoo, after all that bitching about her having too much stuff.

His pupils are wide, dark, and anticipating. They share this look, like they both know what comes next.

Kissing him feels _exactly_ as she has imagined. She's fantasized about it more than she cares to admit, especially when he purses his plush lips in that signature pout – he pouts so much. They're warm and smooth and full and so unbearably gentle, until she shoves her tongue into his mouth. Then it all changes – they go from zero-to-sixty fast, like a gunshot, and it is as if he had been waiting for her to pull the trigger. What was once soft becomes a symphony of teeth and sucking and _He really is an expert,_ she thinks.

He whisks her away to the motel, arm settled at the small of her back, before she even knows they've left the party. She can't tell if she's walking _really_ or if he's just completely supporting her. She just glides along, thrilled to be with him and thrilled to have his undivided focus. The stairs are tough, but they take a pit-stop in the stairwell.

As he inserts their room key into the lock, she is motionless and her cornflower-blue eyes are fixed unwaveringly on his hand. She is trying to find one image to tether herself to, to force the whirling sensation to go away.

But as soon as the door shuts behind them, she abandons this task. She comes to life and launches herself at him, and in the blink of an eye he's up against the wall and his flannel shirt is on the floor. She catches him off-guard and dominates him, pulling at his clothes, but as soon as he can register what is taking place he flips them around so that she's the one cornered. He hoists her up, pressing his hips between her thighs, doing a little-but-not-enough to quell that ache in her lower abdomen.

Everything about him is hot, so hot she offhandedly fears she might spontaneously combust. Still against the wall, she helps him rip her clothes off not because she wants him to have better access to her body – which she definitely does –, but mainly because she is so terribly overheated. His skin is hot, his breath is hot, and his touch is scalding.

Through the dizziness and the sweet-sour taste of alcohol in both their mouths, they try to find a tempo. It's difficult and when both parties want to force themselves on the other it results in a sort of clash of wills. She bites his lip and he bites hers. She slips her hand roughly into his jeans and he does the same. This isn't a game that can be won but they're playing it like it is.

Eventually he's naked and she's naked and he's fumbling with some packet and when she lies back on the bed the room spins.

And soon she's whining _What are you waiting for?_

And then there's an _Are you sure?_

And she almost wants to laugh because _of course_ she's sure but at the same time she's absolutely not but what comes out of her mouth is _Oh my god just go_.

And he's sniggering and pushing himself into her and she's pulling herself onto him. Somewhere inside her there's an itch that only he can scratch and they're moving and moving but he's not quite getting to it. His palms stick to her slim waist, stick to her everything. Her fingertips tingle and she feels everything but she still can't feel enough of him. It's not perfect – it's all lean muscle and sweat and liquor. But they're not perfect either, and both of them at one point think, fleetingly, _Maybe we shouldn't be doing this_ but it feels so good and they are. He's not Dean, _the _Dean, and she's not Claire the Prophet. They're just two people. It won't change anything if they're just two people.

Exactly what happens is hazy. She dozes off and when she begins to sober up she's lying on top of him in a twin bed, stuck to him like a starfish. He's snoring lightly, peacefully. Her skin adheres to his and her whole body feels clammy. He's like a space heater. She's not wearing a lick of clothing and yet her core temperature is soaring through the roof.

She wonders if he'll be offended if she relocates several feet away, to her own bed. She wouldn't be, and so she doesn't think he will. It's only a move of convenience. He's too hot and the bed is too small.

She lies back on her cool, crisp sheets and the room isn't spinning anymore. It's just shrouded in grainy darkness. The space between her legs feels slippery and sticky at the same time and every fiber of her being is begging for a shower.

In the fog of drunkenness, it was easy to dissociate _Dean _Dean from Dean, the handsome man laughing and knocking back shots. But now they are one and the same and it is terrifying.

* * *

**A/N: Don't hate me please! I know this wasn't romantic, but it wasn't supposed to be! I tried to give the last scene a kind of whirlwind/spontaneous flow, so I hope that comes across. There's definitely a sort of trajectory this story could have taken, but I wanted to push against the typical arch of these sorts of things. Let me know if you guys think - I'm praying it's not too disappointing. **


	10. The Chain

**A/N: Thank you so so so much to ImpalaLove, Wolflihood, and Nemu-Chan for reviewing! You guys are awesome and I'm glad you seem to like the pacing so far. I hope you all enjoy this chapter.**

**Song: The Chain by Fleetwood Mac**

* * *

**CHAPTER 10**

**The Chain**

When Claire wakes up, Dean is already showered and dressed.

"Hey," he says ineffectually as she stretches her arms over her head and yawns. Her hangover is mitigated by the adrenaline suddenly rushing through her veins. It takes her a moment to remember that she is naked, but she attempts to act unfazed, even as his eyes drag over her exposed chest.

"Hi," she replies, voice hoarse. "Why didn't you wake me?"

"You looked like you needed the sleep," he answers sheepishly, with a feeble smile. It is odd to see him hesitant. He chews the inside of his cheek, ostensibly contemplating some course of action. Eventually he starts, "So, about last night…"

"Look," she interrupts, having prepared this speech already. "I know you don't want to have a whole talk about it, so I'll save you the trouble. We're both consenting adults. Obviously I can't lie, I find you attractive, and when two people who feel this way about one another drink copious amounts of tequila this shit is practically bound to happen. Plus, I think it's safe to say we've been under a lot of stress and there has been a lot of pent-up… energy. I really don't think anything has to change."

Dean's expression is unreadable. Without a word, he strides over to the bed, braces himself against the mattress, and kisses her hard on the mouth. Claire goes rigid in astonishment, and her stomach fills with a disgraceful fluttering sensation. When he breaks the contact, he murmurs, "How did that feel to you?"

She bites her lip in clear uncertainty, as if to erase the faint taste of mint and the memory of him there. "Umm… Good?"

It felt like something she didn't have a name for.

He stands fully and pulls away. "I think we're probably too far gone to have the whole 'things don't have to change' talk."

Claire swallows heavily, not knowing what to say now that her meticulously rehearsed riposte has been dismissed. She's overcome by fear and shyness; there are images flashing behind her eyes. She remembers telling him the Story, how he cradled her in his arms on the bathroom floor, how he peered at her with such genuine sympathy and understanding, and she remembers his body on top of hers, moving, writhing, his hands touching her _everywhere_… These two discrete events merge into one within her mind.

"I'm just… I'm just gonna go take a shower," she finally manages, taking the top sheet along with her to the bathroom.

She throws herself under an ice-cold stream of water, utterly distressed. His words – _too far gone_ – resound in her brain. What does this mean?

One night of hot sex does not a relationship make. One night of bearing her soul to him does not a relationship make. But together… Do they have a thing? Do they mean something to one another? No – how can they? He must have just had a really good time.

Claire does not emerge from the shower looking any less shell-shocked. She had expected him to jump at the chance to pretend it never happened, and now everything she thought she understood is topsy-turvy. All of it – all the demons and Jersey Devils and reapers and ghosts – was easier for her to wrap her head around than this.

They are silent for a long while as they pack their bags.

At some point Dean says, "If you – if you think it was a mistake, we can try to go back to the way it was… I didn't think –"

"I don't think it was a mistake," she cuts him off without looking at him. "It's just… an adjustment." She zips her backpack and flits her eyes up to meet his. "But obviously there's a lot in play here…"

He turns his head away from her, towards the window. The sounds outside are the same, but everything else seems different.

"You said it," he snorts.

"I think we should be… careful."

"Yeah," he replies, as though this is the understatement of the century.

"I didn't mean for this to happen – I don't think either of us did."

"No…"

"But it did, and I think we can handle it like adults."

"I think we already did," he jokes, shooting her a lewd wink.

She rolls her eyes. "You know what I mean."

More seriously, he replies, "Yeah. I guess we'll just… see what happens."

Never in a million years did Dean expect anything even akin to this to transpire. In fact, he had staunchly intended for it not to. But historically liquor had a way of screwing up his plans. There was that time at the junior prom… Anyway, whenever his head got turned off and other parts of his anatomy were turned on, things usually went south pretty quickly.

But it's not the thinking-with-his-dick that is the problem _really_. It's that he _isn't_ just thinking with his dick. He's thinking with something else, something in his chest, between his lungs. And this both horrifies and compels him at the same time.

_What would Sam say?_ he thinks briefly. That little pansy would probably be thrilled. He stumbled into something he'd been trying to avoid all along, something that Sam had wanted for him.

_No, not really_, another part of him insists. This certainly isn't the white picket fence his brother had envisioned. It's just him on his path to find Sam, with a passenger. A little extra cargo. A little extra cargo that he fucked and shares a 'deep connection' with (Lydia's words, not his). Nothing to get too cagey about. It's not like they're discussing their _emotions_ (barf). He just kinda likes her and she's a good lay.

His grating (by Claire's account) ringtone stirs him from these thoughtful musings.

"Hello?"

Claire mouths _Who is it?_ and he covers the mouthpiece of the phone and replies, "Bobby."

"Any headway?"

"Naw. This stuff ain't exactly posted on the front page of the _Times_," says Bobby. "Any chance you can try Cas?"

Dean grits his teeth and clenches his knuckles tighter around the phone. "I can try," he grinds out, "but the son of a bitch has been MIA for over a week. I needed him before, and he was nowhere to be found."

"Well, give it a shot and I'll keep tryin' – I'll let you know if I find anythin'."

After tossing the phone aside, he rubs his eyes in apparent fatigue.

"What'd he say?" Claire asks tentatively.

"He wants me to call Cas," is his flat response.

"To pray to him?"

He doesn't speak, only nods.

"You don't think he'll answer?"

"Why would he?" he spits. Though his tone is saturated in anger, there is a hint of disillusionment mixed in.

All of a sudden, Claire doubles over on the edge of the bed. Dean is, at this point, able to instantly recognize this singular sort of pain. He rushes to find a pad of paper and pen.

"Write it down for me," she breathes through her locked jaw. "_They say there is a way out, a way out for people like me. I've just gotta find it. I don't know where it leads – up, down, or through – but I figure if there's a 2/3 shot it'll be better, I ought to try to find it. Maybe Dean'll find me first, but who knows how long it could take. Wouldn't it be nice if I could show him he doesn't have to save me every single time. Maybe then we wouldn't always have to be so messed up._"

Dean's hands shake and his face goes white as he reads what she's dictated to him. "Do you think he knows you were listening?" he asks, softly.

"How could he?"

"I dunno," he murmurs, more to himself than to her. He looks up from the page. "Did it hurt less to do it like that?"

"A little. I got the words out quicker, so the pain stopped faster," she allows, still hung-up on how stricken his expression is. "Are you worried he's gonna…"

"Gonna find a way to zap himself into Heaven or Hell? Yeah. A little," he parrots.

_A 2/3 shot it'll be better._ Sam can accept being dead, so long has he's sorted into the right level, she realizes abruptly. It's _Dean_ who can't accept Sam being dead.

"We'd better try calling Castiel," she says gravely.

He drops on the bed and holds his head over his knees. "Castiel," he says, "who art screwing around in Heaven, please get your feathery ass down here and help a bro out."

He peaks up to see nothing but Claire's unamused face.

"Figures," he grumbles.

"Let me try?"

He raises his eyebrows, but replies, "Go for it."

Closing her eyes, she says, "Castiel, I need your help. If you can hear me –"

"Yes?" comes a distinctive growl of a voice.

"What the hell, Cas?!" Dean demands furiously. "What, you're being selective about the calls you're taking nowadays? Heaven keeping you too busy?"

"Heaven is keeping me busy," he affirms. "And yes, I do have to be selective about who I answer. I am leading a revolution, Dean." His usual slump seems more pronounced and there are dark circles beneath his eyes, physical verifications of his excuse.

"So you answer her but not me?"

"She is a prophet. You must understand, this makes her one of Heaven's most important emissaries on Earth. If she prays to me, it is my duty to answer her."

"Whatever," he snaps with a glare. "Claire, can you give me and Cas a minute alone?"

She looks bewildered, but nevertheless replies, "Sure. I'll just… go for a walk or something."

When she's out of the room, Castiel asks, "What is it you need to speak about in private?"

Instead of answering, Dean throttles him straight in the nose. "That's for not answering me, you dick!"

Castiel, being an angel, is only emotionally injured by the blow. "You didn't want Claire to see you assault me?" he notices.

"Call me old-fashioned."

"I am sorry I have caused you distress, but I knew you didn't truly need my help."

"Well, I need your help now."

Castiel scans the room, his eyes eventually settling on the door that Claire has just passed through. "Something seems… different," he observes.

"Yeah, we're in Vegas."

"Not that." His eyes dart to Dean's bed, and narrow when he observes the mess of sheets. "You're not –"

"So what if I am?" he cuts him off defensively, anticipating his question.

Castiel's customary frown deepens. "I believe it might be inadvisable to become romantically entangled with your own prophet, Dean. One or both of you may come to find it… overwhelming."

"There are no 'romantic entanglements' going on here."

"I'm an angel, Dean. My senses of perception –"

"I said, there are _no_ 'romantic entanglements.'"

"If that is what you say," he relents with a sigh. "Now, what is it you need my help with?"

"Rogue reapers – is there such a thing?"

"I've heard rumors about them, yes…"

"I need to find one."

Without preamble, Castiel vanishes for half-a-second.

"There's one here, in Las Vegas," he says when he returns. "His name is Remy."

"Remy?" he repeats in disbelief.

"Yes. You can find him playing the slots in a place called Caesar's Palace. It never ceases to amaze me how you humans butcher the legacies of your predecessors – Julius Caesar was by no means a proponent of gambling…"

"Alright, Cas. Thanks." He puts his hand on the other man's shoulder, and Castiel offers him a weak smile.

"Until we meet again, Dean," he says, disappearing beneath his grasp.

Dean is left with nothing but a handful of air.

. . .

Even after discussing their arrangement, there was a newfound aura of discomfort enveloping Dean and Claire. Castiel's words stick in Dean's skull – _overwhelming_. He doesn't know what he meant by it, but it sounded like a warning.

Dean's track record with women isn't exactly stellar. And if Lydia was correct, his and Claire's 'connection' is 'one-sided.' This means that if one of them is going to be 'overwhelmed' it'll likely be Claire. But as long as they keep things casual, he doubts he's going to break her heart or something stupid like that, if that's what Cas was referring to. The trick is to keep it casual. He's been doing this his entire life – there's no reason it should start being difficult now.

But the thing is, it is.

He never would have told anyone – not even Sam – half the shit she knows. And that's what makes it… difficult.

He already has an Achilles' heel – if he has two, it just means he's weak. It's not like he doesn't know that everyone around him dies. It's not like he doesn't know that being around him puts her at risk of dying. It's not like he doesn't know that he can't have things like this, things that make him happy, things that make him feel anything other than sorrow.

But what can he do? He's stuck with her. He needs one weakness to save the other. It just boils down to which loss would cut him deeper, and that is and always will be Sam.

"Dean?" she murmurs on their way to Caesar's Palace.

"Hm?"

He casts her a sidelong glance and sees that she's peering at him in that way he hates, with wide, imploring eyes.

"What happens after we get Sam back?"

_Oh __**shit**_, he thinks. He swears he feels his spirit try to escape his body in panic, like a spooked animal.

Gulping down the frog in his throat, he noncommittally replies, "We'll cross that bridge when we get to it."

By some grace of God, they arrive at the hotel/casino before she can press the issue.

Dean steps out of the car and the valet scowls at it disdainfully, his eyes then travelling pointedly over the row of Ferraris and Lamborghinis parked in front.

Dean tosses him the keys and says, "Don't you dare scratch 'er," grinning cheekily.

They walk into to the 'Palace' and are confronted by a starkly different Vegas than they have thus far experienced. The lobby brings together a variety of people, ranging from millionaire socialites to fanny pack-totting tourists. Thankfully, this means Claire and Dean don't look _too _out-of-place. There's marble everywhere, along with flowers and jewelry and all the glitz and glamour you would expect from one of Las Vegas' most famous landmarks.

The lights in the casino are disorienting, and the carpeting and ceiling are optical illusions. It's like stepping into some extraterrestrial mall. There are no windows, no clocks, nothing to anchor you to the outside world – just hordes of people and an array of strange-looking tables.

"Do you know what we're looking for?" asks Claire.

"Some guy named Remy."

"Yeah, but how are we supposed to know who he is?"

This is a valid concern.

"Cas said he was playing slots."

And so they make their way over to a line of blinking machines. The lights and the chiming sounds coming out of them make them seem like a baby's toys, and the blank, fixated stares of those sitting in front of them make Dean think, briefly, that maybe there really isn't any hope for humanity after all. They have no idea how many of his friends have died for them – how hard he has fought to ensure that they keep their lives and their free will – and this is what they do with that privilege.

Dean spots a man who looks like he could be a Remy. He's leaning back in his chair and smoking a cigarette, apparently unfazed by the rather large sum of money that he has won against all odds. He has greasy blond hair that he has attempted to slick back, and is wearing some sort of metrosexual, Euro-chic attire.

"Remy?"

The man snaps his head in their direction. He grins, revealing a row of crooked, smoke-stained teeth. "Dean Winchester and Claire Shurley. To what do I owe zee pleasure?" he asks.

"You know who we are?"

He gives them a sly look. "_Everyone_ knows who you are."

"I hear you're a reaper for hire," Dean says, choosing to ignore this ominous statement.

"I don't know where you could have possibly heard that," he replies, feigning coyness as he inspects his blunt fingernails.

"Let's just say I've got connections in high places."

He quirks a bushy eyebrow. "Your friend, zee angel, you mean? Castiel, iz it?"

"Let's just cut to the chase. I know what you do, and I'm willing to pay."

He puts a hand over his heart in mock offense. "You think I can be bought?"

"I _know_ you can be."

Remy extinguishes his cigarette in the ashtray beside the slot machine. "Okay, I'll play along. What are you willing to pay?"

"However much you want."

The other man laughs. "It iz not a question of _how much_, so much as it iz of _what_."

"Fine," he says in trepidation, "as long as it's got nothing to do with souls."

"I do not care about zee souls," he dismisses languidly. "There iz a talisman I would like."

"Okay. Help me get to Purgatory and back and you've got yourself a deal."

Remy slides another Marlboro out of the carton and lights it up, puffing tendrils of smoke dangerously close to their faces. "Very well. Two tickets there and three tickets back, I presume?"

"One," Dean corrects unflinchingly. "One ticket there, two back."

"What?!" Claire demands, incredulous.

Remy sends Claire a catlike smirk. "Would you like me to give you a moment to discuss zee terms?"

"Yeah," Dean grunts. Without further ado, he leads Claire aside by the elbow.

"You are _not_ going without me," she hisses, trying-but-failing to rein in her outrage for fear of causing a scene.

"I have to," he insists. "I can't risk you going in there with me."

"We already went over this! I can take care of myself!"

"The angels can't protect you in Purgatory. You're staying here – end of story."

"You have no right –"

"I have every right. This is my problem, not yours."

"After everything, I think we're in this together."

Dean runs a hand through his hair, obviously frustrated. He can see tears welling in her eyes, but he is unmoved. He has to be.

"No," is all he says.

* * *

**A/N: Please let me know what you think :)**


	11. Purgatory

**A/N: Thank you so much to ImpalaLove, Nemu-Chan, and toridw317 for reviewing! You guys are the best!**

**Song: Purgatory by Iron Maiden**

* * *

**CHAPTER 11**

**Purgatory**

Claire drives the Impala back to the motel, lost. She fights back tears, and for a while she succeeds. But in the end, she always cries when she's mad.

"Fuck Dean, fuck all of this," she chants to herself. She can't be heard over the radio. It sings fast, angry music, angry like she is, and she speeds, speeds past all the red-hued billboards and neon signs. It seems fitting that everything should unravel in Las Vegas.

What's the point of 'seeing where it goes' and abandoning her all at once? It doesn't make any sense. He is a huge contradiction. One minute he seems like he cares, the next he's running away from her, treating her like a hapless child. She doesn't know if he thinks he's protecting her or protecting himself, but she supposes it doesn't matter.

She storms all the way from the parking-garage to the room, stomping up the stairs and wrenching the door open with a smash.

It's not until she's inside that another smash echoes through the building, and this time she is not the cause of it.

. . .

"You have exactly twenty-four hours," Remy tells him, his tone steeped in boredom. "Meet me back here, in this same location."

Purgatory looks just as Claire's visions have described it – winding trees as far as the eye can see, and everything distorted through a sepia lens. It is so tranquil and placid that it feels as though he is moving within a landscape painting. There isn't even any breeze.

Dean spins around to confirm that he has heard what Remy said, but he's already gone.

"Alright, Sammy. Where are you…" he mumbles to himself. Where does he even begin? What if twenty-four hours isn't enough to canvas the place? It seems to stretch on forever.

In his mind the first logical move is to start shouting Sam's name, which is precisely what he does.

The noise immediately attracts visitors, none of which are Sam and none of which appear to be friendly.

Soon it becomes clear: vamps. A pack of them. They encircle him, fidgeting, itching to attack.

Luckily, there was no way Dean was gonna plunge down this rabbit hole unarmed – he unsheathes his machete from his jacket pocket, holding it menacingly in front of him with both hands.

"Another Winchester," one of them growls, bearing his fangs. "We should have known the other wouldn't be far behind."

"I don't want any trouble," Dean says. "Tell me where you've seen my brother, and no one gets hurt."

The vampire laughs and it sounds sinister, like a hyena. "You don't even remember us, do you? Missouri, 1999."

Dean squints his eyes in obscure recognition. He vaguely recalls wasting a nest of vamps sometime around then. "Ah. So it's personal."

Without responding, they throw themselves at him, and he hacks away like he's playing baseball. He could have gone pro, if he dad had ever let him join Little League, he thinks. Blood splatters everywhere, all over his face and shirt. In one minute flat, four decapitated bodies surround him like fallen dominoes.

The fifth, he has left alive. He crouches over him, digging his blade deeply into the monster's throat. He can feel the curve of his bones grate beneath steel.

"Where's Sam?" he hisses ruthlessly.

The vamp laughs again, its fangs mottled by its own dark blood. "Why would I tell you anything?"

"Because you want to keep your head?"

"Go ahead – kill me. It wouldn't be the first time."

Dean's upper lip twitches in aggravation, but he shrugs and says, "Can't say I didn't try to be diplomatic," before slicing the machete clean through his neck.

He stands, observing the carnage, and wipes the droplets of blood and sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. He can't imagine weeks of this.

"Dammit, Sam."

. . .

Claire comes-to in a dark room. She discovers after a moment of squirming that the room is not actually dark, but instead she is blindfolded, and her arms and legs are tied to a chair.

"Hello? What's going on?" Panic laces each syllable.

"Ah good, you're awake," drawls a British accent.

The cloth is finally removed from her eyes and she sees that she is in some sort of warehouse, baking under harsh fluorescent lights. The man in front of her is stocky, dark-haired, and balding.

"Who are you?" she demands, perhaps a bit too bravely for her own good.

"Name's Crowley," he replies. His voice is raspy and serene at the same time, and his hands are clasped behind his back as he paces in front of her. He's flanked by two taller men in suits.

"_Castiel_," she prays.

Crowley wags his finger at her as though he is chastising a naughty child. "No, no," he tsks. "None of that. We've angel-proofed the place."

"I'm very important to them."

"Oh I know, love. And back when the archangels were strong, I might've been worried, but nowadays it's just a big, tangled mess of politics up there. I doubt they'll be organized enough to stage a rescue mission, or even hear your call for help."

"What do you want from me?" she snarls venomously.

He resumes his pacing. "Nothing, at the moment."

"Then why did you abduct me?"

"You see, something very dear was snatched out of my jurisdiction, and I would like to know _how_."

"Your jurisdiction?" she echoes.

"Yes. Hell. I'm the King of Hell, as a matter of fact. Lucy being shoved back into the Cage led to a lovely little promotion for me. Anywho, Sam was pulled out by something or someone mysterious, and that's not supposed to happen."

"I don't know who or what got him out."

"I know you don't. I've been trailing you and Clyde since Wisconsin. But when the infamous Dean Winchester finds out – which we both know he eventually will – I should like to know who the culprit is, and the end-game."

"What do you need me for?"

"Motivation, of course. I've been trying to get his attention for ages, but he's got bloody tunnel vision when it comes to that great oaf of a brother," he sneers. "All the omens went straight over his pretty little head, so I decided it was time to take a more direct approach – hence your involvement in this scheme. And even if I don't know what to do with you just yet, there's certainly no _harm_ in having a prophet in my possession."

"It took quite a while to get one of you alone," he prattles on. "Joined at the hips, you two. Did you know, back in ancient times people believed that prophetesses would lose their sight if they fornicated? Fortunately, that ended up being untrue…"

"Shut up," Claire snaps.

He grins charismatically. "You're feistier than I expected. You always look so mild and doe-eyed around your partner in crime, but I suppose the reason for that is a bit obvious."

"Shut. Up."

"Have I touched a nerve? My apologies. Just picture how your valiant hero will rush to your aid once he retrieves his brother from Purgatory, finally gaining the courage to express all that he's been warring with for some time now. That should lift your spirits." He speaks with his hands, like a film director describing a scene from his script.

_Oh my god_, she thinks, _does he ever stop talking? _But she has to admit, he has more flair than she'd expected from a demon. He's the first one she's ever met – she had always thought of them as being pure evil, but he… well, he's damn near charming, if you look past the whole imprisonment thing.

"How did you know he's in Purgatory?" she questions.

"Haven't you been listening? You've been under my surveillance since I got topside. Being King of Hell means I have a great deal of resources at my disposal, as well as effective methods of _persuasion_."

"He's gonna kill you," she tells him matter-of-factly, struggling futilely against her restraints.

Crowley smiles broadly once more. "We'll see about that."

. . .

It's hard to keep track of twenty-four hours when the sky never changes. There is a sun, but it just hovers low and still – useless. He has a watch but he doesn't entirely trust it, what with the inter-dimensional travel and all.

By now, he's killed his way through nearly two-dozen monsters, but they just keep coming. There seems to be an infinite supply. He's absolutely drenched in blood – some of it his, most of it others' – and it's starting to dry, forming a thick, uncomfortable crust over his face and hands and making his clothing stiff. The scent of copper is overpowering and nauseating, and the only thing he can smell. He never thought an adrenaline high could last so long – his heart has been pounding a mile-a-minute for the past six hours at least, and part of him fears it might soon explode.

He has fought tooth and nail to survive before, but never for such a drawn-out period of time. He doesn't even want to think about what kind of shape his brother is in.

"SAM!" he cries out, descending into desperation.

Nothing. Silence.

He keeps moving, keeps marking tree trunks so he can find his way back.

At some point he stumbles upon a stream. It bubbles and trickles over rocks and branches, clear as crystal; it seems to be the only thing moving in the forest. The water is cool and he knows he should be thirsty but he isn't. He cups it in his hands and scrubs his face, washing the layer of blood off of his skin.

All of a sudden, he hears something shift in the foliage on the other side of the stream. Dean wipes the water out of his eyes and picks up his weapon, gripping the handle until his knuckles blanche.

"C'mon out, you son of a bitch," he growls. "I know you're there."

The rustling grows louder, and a hulking figure emerges, covered in dirt and blood. His long hair is stringy and coated in various substances, but Dean recognizes him instantly.

His features slacken and his voice goes rough. "Sam?" he murmurs.

"Dean?" says the other, overcome by a parallel cocktail of emotions.

Sam crosses the brook in a hurry, paying no mind to the fact that the jeans become waterlogged from the knees down. Dean's machete falls to the ground, suddenly completely inconsequential.

Dean grips his brother tight, holding him in a bone-crushing embrace and knotting his fists in the tattered remnants of his coat. "Sammy…" he breathes out in profound relief.

Sam reciprocates the gesture, but seems more surprised than relieved.

"How did you find me?" he asks when they pull apart.

"Cas found me a reaper."

"A reaper brought you here?"

"Yeah, like you said. Why?"

"Some of the monsters say there's a door – a door you can go through to get back."

"Back?"

"Yeah – back to Earth, I think. I'm close to finding it."

"That's great and all, but let's just wait for the reaper…"

"Can we trust it?"

"What other choice we got?"

"The door!"

"Look, Sammy, it took me long enough to find you in the first place and I ain't taking any chances on getting us back. For all we know, that door could be a one-way ticket to the flame city. Let's just go to where we're supposed to meet the reaper and get the hell out of Dodge."

Sam opens his mouth hesitantly, as if he might dispute this, but eventually agrees, "Alright."

They stare at one another for a long while, as though they're trying to see which parts are different. The last time Sam saw him, his brother's left eye was swollen shut and his jaw was broken, and his own knuckles bore the stains of guilt.

"I'm glad you're okay," Dean says eventually, patting him affectionately on the shoulder.

"Dean, I – "

"We don't need to talk about it."

Sam's eyebrows draw together and he swallows his apology. Nothing he can say would change what happened. At least Dean knows it wasn't really him.

. . .

Claire has been screaming in agony for three hours straight, and not because of anything Crowley has done.

She saw everything – Dean killing all those monsters, Dean and Sam finding one another – all of it. It's been the strongest, clearest vision yet. And she has no way of recording it.

"Please," she begs Crowley, "I just need paper and a pencil – something to write with, _anything_."

"And untie your hands? Do I look like an idiot to you?"

"Fine, then… Then just have someone write it down for me." It crosses her mind that this may not be a wise idea – but the unbearable pain is clouding her judgment.

Crowley rolls his eyes, but quickly realizes that whatever she's seeing may be quite informative. "Fine," he allows, moderating his tone to remain cavalier, "so long as you stop that infernal yowling. I wasn't even planning on torturing you."

He orders one of his henchmen to procure a computer, and soon enough Claire is dictating what's happening in Purgatory in real-time.

"It's like having our very own newscaster," Crowley remarks to his two inexpressive minions. She thinks offhandedly that he might look more at home waving a martini glass in one hand. "Maybe we can figure out whole who-stole-dear-Sammy-from-the-Cage mystery without even involving Scooby and Shaggy," he muses aloud.

Unfortunately for him, though (and fortunately for her), none of the information she reveals sheds any light on the matter. Indeed, it looks like Sam doesn't know who bailed him out either.

. . .

"So, what was it the psychic said about a prophet?" Sam asks as they wait guardedly for Remy.

"Yeah, apparently prophets exist, and one of them has visions about us."

"Only about us?"

"Yep."

"And was she – it is a _she_, right?"

"Yeah," he affirms, unenthusiastically. He fails to offer a name. It's probably better this way.

If Sam notices, he doesn't draw attention to it. "Was she with you before you came here?"

"Yeah, I left her in Vegas."

"You've been with her this whole time?" He seems mildly incredulous, as though he can't fathom the notion of his brother being with anyone other than him for such an extended duration of time.

"Yeah," he repeats again.

"Why didn't you take her with you?"

"Too dangerous."

His responses are short and clipped – almost like they're broaching a sensitive subject, Sam notes. He shoots him a skeptical look. "I would've thought you'd gotten past your savior complex, what with stopping the Apocalypse and all."

"You stopped the Apocalypse, not me," he counters.

"It was both of us," he insists, somewhat perturbed that his brother seems as self-loathing as ever.

"Fine. Whatever. But I didn't know what to expect from this place, and I don't want any more blood on my hands if I can help it."

"How do you know she'll be okay back there?"

"She's got some sort of angel Secret Service situation going on. If she prays, they _have_ to answer her. I figure Cas'll come through if anything goes wrong."

Sam nods thoughtfully, processing this information. "How did you find her?"

"She found me. In Illinois."

"She found you?"

"Yeah, she was working at a bar that I stopped in and she recognized me from her visions."

"And you believed that?"

"Obviously I thought it was a crock of shit at first," he replies pointedly, "but she ended up being the real deal. She knew about Michael and Lucifer and everything else."

Sam's mouth forms an upside-down U-shape and he lifts his eyebrows. "Huh. And so what, she just volunteered to help you out with this?"

"That's one way to put it…"

Something in Dean's tone piques Sam's interest – there might have been a lot of time and trauma between now and when he last saw his brother, but he can still sense when he's not telling him the whole story.

"How did she feel about you coming to get me alone?" he probes.

Dean seems suddenly fascinated by a clump of sodden leaves near his right foot.

"She wasn't real happy," he mumbles evasively. "You'll see soon enough. Anyway, how the hell did you get here?"

"I have no idea," he admits, a bit more solemnly. "I don't remember anything after falling into the Pit until just… _appearing_ here."

"Awesome," he says sarcastically. "I guess we'll just have to figure that out when we get back."

Out of the blue, the brothers' ears hone in on the crunch of leaves nearby.

"Hostiles?" whispers Dean.

"There's no other type," Sam states grimly in response.

Sam doesn't have a machete like his brother, only some sort of wooden club that he appears to have carved himself. Nevertheless, he holds it in an identical fashion, just like their father had taught them.

This time their assailants are werewolves.

The boys spring into action, swinging and slashing like a pair of axe murderers. Even through the chaos, Dean has a chance to observe his brother fight – he looks positively feral, like a man possessed. He smashes at their skulls, smashes at their entire bodies, until they are long dead and he is beating a corpse. Blood sprays everywhere. It soaks him, and he seems entirely comfortable with it – more comfortable with than he has ever seen him, including when he was jacked up on demon blood. He seems to enjoy it.

When all the monsters are dead, they stand back-to-back, chests heaving in deep gulps of stagnant air. For a moment, it feels just like old times.

"You all right?" Dean questions, unnerved by what he has just witnessed. His baby brother was never supposed to be the merciless one.

"Yeah. Fine," he pants.

Azazel's words, from long ago, are still etched into his brain: _How certain are you that what you brought back is one-hundred-percent, pure Sam?_

He had always been certain until now.

* * *

**A/N: I hope you guys are still liking it! If you're unhappy with Dean's behavior from the last chapter, don't worry - that will be addressed in-depth in the next chapter. Please let me know what you think :) **


	12. Fly Away From Here

**A/N: Thank you so much to toridw317, Nemu-Chan, ImpalaLove, themightypanda, and PadfootCc for reviewing! I hope you all enjoy this chapter :)**

**Song: Fly Away From Here by Aerosmith**

* * *

**CHAPTER 12**

**Fly Away From Here**

Back on Earth, Remy deposits Dean and Sam in a location that is most definitely not Caesar's Palace. It's a derelict storage warehouse, from the looks of things. The floor is made of stained concrete – as are the walls – and wayward wires and pipes traipse across the ceiling. The Winchester brothers have encountered many a hideout like this one. From these encounters, they have learned one very important lesson: nothing good has ever happened in an empty warehouse.

Dean's stomach jumps in the cavity of his abdomen when he realizes at once that they have been double-crossed.

"Where the hell are we?" he snarls, flying to attack Remy.

Remy sidesteps him smoothly, until Sam comes up from behind and pins his arms behind his back.

"Just wait a minute, my friends," he sputters apologetically, "there's no need to get violent."

"Thank you, Remy," echoes a cockney drawl.

All of a sudden, four men in suits barrage Sam and Dean and yank them away from the duplicitous reaper.

Remy brushes off the front of his trousers and combs his hair back with his fingers, glowering offendedly at the boys .

"My men will see to your payment on your way out."

Remy is led away as Dean and Sam are tied up.

"Hello, boys," the man greets with a Cheshire grin. "Can't trust anyone these days, can you? Disgraceful. What ever happened to professional integrity?

"Who are you?" Dean demands, his voice rumbling off the walls.

"This introduction has been a long time coming, I think. My name is Crowley," he replies smugly. "Perhaps you've heard of me."

"Oh, I've heard of you, you son of a bitch."

"Pet names already? And I haven't even gotten to the good part…"

Both Winchesters thrash vehemently against their captors, but to no avail. Even for them, it's nearly impossible to escape rope _and _human (well, technically demon) restraints.

"You let us go _right now_!"

"You know, I don't think I will? In fact, I've heard you lot are the slippery sort, so I'm taking extra precautions to make sure you don't slide between my fingers."

"What is it you want from us?" Sam asks. His square jaw is clenched, but his tone is a bit more levelheaded than his brother's.

"Ah, the famous Sam Winchester finally speaks. What I'd like is fairly simple, really – I want to know how you pulled your little Houdini act out of Lucifer's bloody Cage."

"I don't know," Sam grinds out.

"You say that," Crowley muses pensively, as though he has anticipated this response, "but I'm not sure if I believe you."

One of the henchmen digs a knife into his ribs, just hard enough not to pierce his skin.

"Let's give you a bit of a polygraph test, shall we?" He turns towards the back of the large, open room. "Bring 'er in, lads!" he orders someone out of sight.

At the mention of a 'her,' each and every muscle in Dean's body coils. He fights against the ropes and the demon holding him, his wrists chafing and teeth rattling in the process. His glare is gone and his eyes are wide and intense.

"Oh ho ho, someone's getting all riled up," Crowley baits, blatantly enjoying Dean's dismay.

Out comes Claire, bound and gagged. It only takes one demon to shove her into the center of the room. Without his support her knees give out and she collapses on the floor, her grunt of pain muffled by the thick silver line of duct-tape over her mouth.

Crowley circles her, a dagger sliding out of his coat sleeve and into his hand, and addresses Sam, "Now, I know _you_ may not care much for this delicious little gingersnap, but your brother certainly does. You wouldn't want to cause him any unnecessary heartache, would you?"

Sam inclines his head to peer at the man in question, whose guard is back up. Dean's lips are pursed and he stares back at Sam with forced indifference. It doesn't take much for Sam to deduce that this girl must be the notorious prophet.

"Did you know, I never realized what nasty business those visions of hers are. We let her stew for a few hours – you could tell she didn't want to rat out the Clyde to her Bonnie, but after a while it became too much. She started scratching the words into her own flesh, can you believe that?" He shudders dramatically, for added effect. "And in the end, she didn't even reveal any of the juicy bits. Imagine my disappointment."

Claire locks Dean's gaze, and the two become absorbed in silent conversation. Wisps of red hair veil her eyes, but he can still see terror shine in them. What they had fought about before he went to Purgatory suddenly seems irrelevant.

"You let her go right now, do you hear me?" tears from his throat. His impassive ruse has been forsaken, and his voice is desperate, more desperate than Sam might have expected.

"All in good time, all in good time," Crowley assures him. "You know, you should really be thanking _me_ for this little love connection – if my people hadn't made all that fuss in Bumfuck, Illinois, you two might never have found one another. It was almost like a twist of fate, don't you think?"

"Oh, I'll thank you alright –"

"I don't know who or what got me out of Hell," Sam insists hastily, eyes fixed on Claire. "If you know what her visions were, you'd know that."

"Very clever, Moose, but I know you knew she was listening."

"I didn't, I swear – "

Crowley drags his blade across Claire's neck, a thin line of vibrant blood blooming in its wake.

"Stop it!" Dean shouts.

"Oh relax, I'm not gonna scar that pretty face of hers."

"Seriously, I _don't know_," Sam repeats. "We're just as curious as you are. Just let her go – she's got nothing to do with it."

"On the contrary, she's got _everything_ to do with it. You know what I realized just today? Why waste all the time and effort having demons play James Bond to follow you – oh, and then there's the risk that you'll catch them and then the whole plan's out the window – when I have first-class seats on the Winchester express right here?"

"You're going to let her go you tap-dancing motherfucker, or I swear to God –"

"You'll what? Cuss me to death? I don't think so."

"There's no point to this," Sam pleads. "You don't know how I got out, she doesn't know how I got out, and we don't know how I got out. We're not accomplishing anything here."

Crowley strokes his chin contemplatively, before replying, "You know, maybe you're right. I might as well just kill you, since I've got you here anyway."

Dean glowers at Sam like he is a grade-A moron, and Sam wishes he had bitten his tongue.

Suddenly, there's a whooshing behind Dean and Sam and the demons are gone, their eyes blasted out in a burst of white light. Two more demons come running into the room, but they are scattered everywhere in bits and pieces before they even approach their destination.

"I would strongly advise against that," comes Castiel's easily-identifiable growl of a voice.

If Crowley is fazed, he does not let it show. "Ah. You must be the guardian angel. Castiel, is it? I'll have to get creative on whatever shmuck is responsible for dicking up the finger-painting, if you haven't already got 'im…"

"Your sigils were correct," says Castiel. "They failed because I'm no longer just an angel."

At this, even Sam and Dean balk.

"I beg your pardon?"

"It was I who raised Sam from Lucifer's Cage. I overestimated my power, and I was unable to bring him all the way back to Earth – hence why he was stuck in Purgatory."

Crowley finally starts to look unsettled. "If you weren't strong enough to get Sammy-boy out of Purgatory, what the hell's got you so juiced up now?"

Castiel smiles serenely, turning to look at his charges. "Some of the more faithful humans like to say that everything happens for a reason – my experience in Purgatory was very enlightening."

"What do you mean…" asks Crowley, taking a wary step backwards.

"The souls in Purgatory – they belong to neither Heaven nor Hell. They are for the taking."

The King of Hell's eyes bug slightly out of his head and he glances at his three human hostages. "Well," he says, folding his hands, "this is where I bid you adieu." And without further warning, he disappears into thin air.

It's not long before Sam and Dean break free from the ropes around their wrists and ankles, and when they do Dean flings himself towards Claire. He pulls the tape off of her mouth and quickly undoes her restraints, before brushing the hair out of her face and inspecting her for signs of injury. He grimaces at the sight of the cut Crowley inflicted.

"You all right?" he interrogates, still holding her face in his coarse hands.

"I'm okay," she murmurs a moment later, as he helps her to her feet.

His arm lingers around her waist and she leans weakly against him. The motion seems fluid – comfortable. He reeks to the high heavens, but he's still the most reassuring thing she's come into contact with in a long while. Sam stares openly at the two in unchecked awe, before apparently remembering the more monumental revelation at hand.

"Cas, what the hell was that?" Sam demands.

"I am very glad to see that you are all right, Sam," Castiel says, not answering the question.

Still sheltering Claire in a protective embrace, Dean snaps, "Why didn't you tell me you were the one who got Sam out? You saw me running around ass-backwards for weeks and you didn't say a word!"

"I was too ashamed that I had failed," Castiel confesses, head hung low. "I was going to retrieve him once I had harnessed the power of the souls, but you succeeded before I had the chance."

"This soul stuff," Dean starts carefully, "it's risky business, isn't it?"

"Yes," replies Castiel, "but it is a necessary risk, if I am to stand a chance of winning the battle in Heaven."

"How could you do this?" Dean says, still hung-up on his friend's apparent betrayal. "How could you keep this from us?"

"You must understand, everything I have done has been to help you and Sam and Claire."

"You call dumping Sam in Purgatory _helping him_?" he bites back.

"It was certainly an improvement from Lucifer's Cage, I assure you."

Dean rolls his eyes in exasperation. "You've done some shady shit before, Cas, but this has gotta be the coup-de-grace."

"I am sorry you feel that way," Castiel responds, sounding genuinely penitent. "But if I had told you, you would have tried to stop me. In the end, you will see that what I'm doing the best thing for everyone."

With this proclamation still weighing in the air, Castiel vanishes.

. . .

Back at the motel, the first thing Sam says when they're behind closed doors is, "We just have do a little test." He reaches for Claire's hand and she holds it out, not knowing what he's planning to do. Wordlessly, he pours a vial of water onto her wrist.

"See? Not a demon," Dean remarks in a know-it-all, big-brotherly tone.

"I can't believe you've been tangling with demons and you didn't get her warded."

"Must've slipped my mind."

It's as hot as always, and now that Claire's been screened the three are sprawled on various pieces of furniture around the room. The dirt and blood on the brothers' clothing is beginning to cook in the heat, sending an unholy stench wafting through the room. But of all the places, Dean is glad he and Sam are reunited in Las Vegas. By this point it's taken on something of a Hell-on-Earth quality in his mind, much like the rest of their lives.

"Yeah?" Sam snorts, his eyes twinkling in a way that unnerves him. There seems to be a _You were probably too busy doing something else_ hiding somewhere in the sentence, but what Sam doesn't know is that the only _too busy_ was too busy searching for his sorry ass. Crowley had greatly exaggerated the extent of his and Claire's relationship, and must have given him the impression that they had been involved in some torrid romance, when in reality the only romantic contact between them had been a run-of-the-mill drunken romp.

"Well, you oughtta do it soon, now that Crowley's on her trail."

"Warded?" Claire interjects.

Sam tugs down the collar of his shirt, revealing a circular, somewhat satanic-looking tattoo. "Keeps the demons out."

"So _that's _what that is," she mumbles to herself. She'd noticed it on Dean…_ before_, but she'd been too drunk to ask about it.

At this, Sam grins impertinently. "You've seen it?"

Dean, who's next to him on the sofa, jabs him brutally in the ribs. This effectively brings the conversation to a full stop.

Sam, apparently getting the message, adopts a different demeanor and comments, "So, you're the famous Claire. I've gotta be honest, you're not what I was expecting."

"Yeah? Well, you're exactly what I was expecting." Her features sink into a look of sincerity, and she adds, "I hope you're doing all right."

"I'll manage," he replies, flashing her a strained, fleeting smile. "Right now I'm just glad to be back." He flits his eyes to the bathroom door, before continuing, "If you guys don't mind, I think I'm gonna take a much-needed shower and then burn these clothes."

"Sounds like a plan," says Dean, though he too is filthy. He completely ignores the fact that his brother narrows his eyes knowingly before he slinks off.

When they hear the water run, Claire sits beside Dean on the sofa and says, "I think now we actually have to talk."

Dean nods dismally, eyes downcast. "Whaddyou want me to say?" he murmurs. "That I should have taken you with me?"

"That's a start."

"Yeah? Well, I should have. I shouldn't have left you without knowing you were safe…" He's still not making eye contact with her, and now he looks as though he doesn't know how to continue.

"You could say you're sorry," she assists wryly.

"I'm sorry." The response is quick, quicker than either of them had expected – Dean seems to have surprised even himself with how easily the words roll off of his tongue. He peers up at her contritely, and she searches his vivid eyes for traces of insincerity.

After surmising that his apology is valid, she takes his soiled hand in hers and weaves their fingers together. Dean's brow creases as he stares down at their entwined hands, but he does not pull away. He sees marks on her wrist where she allegedly attempted to record his and Sam's trials and he feels a twinge in his chest.

"I forgive you," she says softly. "I know that you're just trying to make sure no one else gets hurt because of you. But Dean, you can't live your whole life worrying about that stuff – it'll drive you crazy."

His gaze bounces up at her again, but now she is the one watching their hands. "I know," he mumbles, not sounding at all like he is going to heed her advice.

"I suppose now that you've got Sam back we have to cross that bridge…"

Dean seems to abruptly snap out of some sort of trance. He gently extricates his hand and says, "Yeah, look…" His tone is harder than before and Claire cannot help but dread what he is going to say next.

"It's not safe for you to be around us," he goes on.

"What happened to the 'we'll see where it goes'?" she quotes, obviously hurt.

Dean hates to be the bad guy – really, he does. But some things are in everyone's best interest, even if they don't feel like it.

"That was before I knew how close we were to finding Sammy," he replies.

"I'm in danger either way," she points out. "Didn't you hear Crowley? He said he wants to use me to keep tabs on you, and if the angels couldn't stop him before, why would they be able to now?"

"I underestimated Crowley before – trust me, that's not gonna happen again. We'll take every precaution to make sure you stay safe. Hell, I'm even thinking of dropping you off at Bobby's. Me and Sam – we move around all the time. We're not exactly set up to be bodyguards."

"So that's what I am to you?" she snaps, ice dripping from each word. "A specimen to be locked away and guarded?"

"Of course not," he replies fervently. "How could you even think that? Even if you weren't a prophet I'd be doing the same thing, you understand me?"

"That's not comforting at all."

He sighs loudly in frustration and runs his hand over his mud-smeared face. "You know what I mean."

"No, I don't. You want me to spend the rest of my days holed up in South Dakota with a crotchety old man I hardly know? I'm a _person_, Dean. I deserve to have a life."

"You'll realize someday," he starts bleakly, "people like us – people who are _chosen_ – don't get to have lives, not really. Ninety-percent of our time is spent trying to survive, and the other ten-percent is spent trying to do some iota of good in this suicide-case we call a world."

"You said once that I might have a life after this, that I could find someone back in Illinois and try to get past all this shit."

"Yeah, well, that was before I knew Crowley had it out for you."

She clutches his ruined sleeve, the fabric crackling under her hand. "If this is my life now, truly, let me figure that out with _you_, not Bobby, not Crowley, not Castiel."

The gears in his mind spin rapidly, trying to fabricate a retort. "We slept together _once_," he snaps eventually, reaching his boiling point. "In the heat of the moment, drunk out of our minds. Maybe it _was_ a mistake. But whatever _this_" – he gestures between them – "is, it's not a relationship. You get that, right?"

"I get that," she grits out. She can't believe how hot and cold he is, how he can toy with her like this.

"Good."

He can't have things like this, he thinks. He can't have someone that is in perpetual danger because of him; he can't take it, the constant, crushing fear that something will happen to them. That's why it's best to cut this off before it goes too far.

He's already supposed to protect Sam, and he already fails at that – why would this be any different?

Plus, only Winchesters come back. If Claire dies, she's dead.

She stands brusquely and sweeps her hand over her hair, blinking back unwanted tears. "So what, your plan is to dump me on Bobby and drop in every so often on your terms, or more likely whenever you need me for something?"

"Claire…" His tone is vastly different – pleading, even. He's distressed to hear himself painted in such a way, especially when some of it rings true.

She laughs bitterly. "Yeah. That's what I thought. I get that Bobby's been cleaning up your messes for a long time, but this isn't something he's gonna be able to take care of for you." She starts towards the door, oblivious to the fact that much of the grime from Dean's clothing has rubbed off on her.

"Where are you going?"

"I need some air."

"But Crowley –"

The door slams, cutting him off.

* * *

**A/N: I hope you liked it! I have the impression that Dean would be very conflicted in a situation like this - while on one hand he's very reliant on his gut instinct, I think he would try to force himself to be rational about the dangers being involved with him would pose. So if he comes off as kind of all over the place, that's my reasoning behind it. Please let me know what you think :)**


	13. Empty Pages

**A/N: As always, thank you so much to the lovely reviewers, themightypanda, Nemu-Chan, and toridw317! I hope everyone likes this chapter.**

**Song: Empty Pages by Traffic**

* * *

**CHAPTER 13**

**Empty Pages**

It's easy to see how this life turns you into an alcoholic, Claire thinks. She'd more or less given up on her prescription crutches – these vices are hard to maintain around other people. But drinking? Well, it's practically in the job description.

That's why she finds herself here, in the bar next-door to their motel. It's after five, but it's the type of bar that's eternally filled with prune-faced alcoholics, drinking alone, drinking because things just never seemed to work out. Their skin is like folded paper, and in each line some event that has scarred their soul is buried. A few of them look exactly like the type of people who got away with murder decades ago, who slipped through the cracks and spent the rest of their lives at war with themselves. She never realized this could be a physical description until now.

She's probably the youngest one there by twenty years, or at least she looks it. She wonders how someday all that has happened will mark her too.

She didn't stray far from the others – just far enough to put some space between her and the source of her agitation. She needs to think.

Dean had a point – they aren't in a relationship. She'd always thought she was exempt from the whole girls-getting-emotional-after-sex thing, but maybe she isn't. Maybe that's the only reason this is happening. She doesn't really even know what she likes about him, anyway. He's crass and he's rude and sometimes he's a total asshole. Guys like him are a dime-a-dozen. Except for, you know, the saving the world aspect.

She sighs deeply and gulps down the shot of whiskey swirling in her glass. She can't help but fear that this – _he_ – has changed everything about her, even her taste in liquor.

. . .

A cloud of steam follows a towel-clad Sam out of the bathroom door. His long hair is dripping wet, and wiping the dirt off of his face has revealed a plethora of scratches and bruises.

Dean tosses him a familiar, army-green duffle without looking at him. "Everything should still be there," he informs him. "I didn't touch it."

"Thanks," he murmurs, staring broodingly at the bag. It does not surprise him that his brother has kept his belongings waiting for him, entirely intact. "But, um, Dean?"

"Yeah?"

"Take it from me," he starts, eyeing his brother in disappointment. "You're making a huge mistake."

Dean rubs his temples wearily. "What?"

"I heard a lot of that."

"Oh."

"You really think dropping her at Bobby's is the solution to this?"

"I'm trying my best here, Sammy. You got a better idea? We need to stash her somewhere safe, somewhere Crowley can't get to her. On the road with us is _not_ safe."

"You think we're just gonna pick up where we left off, don't you?"

Dean narrows his eyes at him incredulously. "Yeah, obviously."

Sam coughs up a dark laugh, turning his sights to the ceiling. "I'm not ready to just jump right back into it, Dean. That place – Hell, Purgatory, whatever – it made me into someone… someone else. I'm not like you – I can't just bury this stuff. I need to deal with it."

"Yeah? Well, we'll deal with it together then. If anyone gets Hell, it's me."

"It's not the same. It's not the same as it was for you. He was inside me, Dean. He was _part_ of me – maybe he still is, maybe he always will be. And then, in that place... there's killing, and then there's _killing._ I was around so many monsters I think I might have become one of them."

"Sam…"

"No. It's not the same. I need to figure this out for myself, I need to figure out what's real."

"What about Cas?"

"You saw what he did to those demons – you really think we can stop him?"

"You don't even think we should try? It's _Cas_!"

"What's the point? What's our success rate? You think I wanna watch Cas tumble down the rabbit hole now too? Haven't we lost enough people?"

"We're not gonna watch him, we're gonna pull him out of it!"

"What if we can't? What if we can't stop any of it, what if we never really could? If it's gonna happen – if we can't do anything to stop it – I at least want to save myself the trouble of seeing it."

"So what, you think we should do nothing?" Dean does not even attempt to mask the pain in his voice.

"You can do whatever you want. All I know is I can't handle seeing that, not after everything."

He swallows heavily, wishing he'd had the foresight to replenish his flask. "Is this your way of telling me you telling me you wanna split up?"

"That's not what I'm saying, I just… I don't know. I need a break, a break from all the blood, the death, the killing… I'm just… I'm tired, Dean. I don't want to do it anymore. And you – you could have gotten out. Do you know what I would give for a chance like that?"

"Claire isn't that out."

"Maybe not. Maybe that was my fantasy, not yours. But you really don't see what you're doing, do you?"

Dean doesn't reply.

"That girl is tangled up in this _anyway_. You're not responsible for it. Do you get how rare that is?"

Still, the elder brother is silent.

"You're throwing all that away," he continues, gaining passion.

The muscle in Dean's jaw tenses, and he peers out the window. That fat black fly is dead on the windowsill, on its back with its legs shriveled up.

"Everyone always said you hated yourself," Sam goes on. "I never really believed them until now."

"You don't even know her," he finally croaks out.

"You're right, I don't – but I know you."

"Yeah, and you know that everything we touch turns to ash. We're supposed to _save _people, Sam, but all we do is hurt them. She won't be any different. There's part of her that – against it all – is still happy, that's not completely fucked up. I'll ruin that. You know I will – I always do."

He pauses, before replying, "All this bad shit that happens to us… It's not because of anything we do – I hope you realize that. It's just… our lot in life, it's fate or destiny or _whatever_. You think you ruin everything you touch, but it's not your fault – it's not anyone's fault."

"Yeah? Well it sure seems like it."

"I'll never understand why you feel the need to take all this on," he admits. "I thought about you all the time down there, Dean. I thought about what you were doing, and I prayed – I _prayed_ – that you weren't driving yourself crazy looking for me, even though I knew you were. Do you really just want it to be me and you, us against the world, until one of us drops dead and the other loses it? Because that's sure as hell not what I want."

"It's not a question of what we _want_," he replies heatedly. His fists clench. It's muscle memory. "It's a question of what we've been given and what we have to do with it."

"Maybe you can accept that, but I can't. All I know is if I had what you had, I'd fight until my dying breath to keep it."

"She's not like Jess or something, Sammy. We've only known each other for a few weeks – it's not what you think it is."

"Dean. What girl are you ever gonna find that knows about us, that _gets it_?"

"She's our _prophet_ – don't you think that's a little messed up?"

"No?" he blurts out. "I think that neither of us was ever going to end up with someone normal. I think it's too good to be true, because you never would've opened up to anyone and you didn't have to. I think that this happened by some freak 'twist of fate,' and I _don't_ think you should ignore it."

There is a long, drawn-out silence that stretches on for far too long – it sticks in the room like a poisoned gas. If you listen closely, you can almost hear their thoughts pounding in their brains.

Suddenly, Sam chuckles sadly to himself and murmurs, "Do you remember how you had that obsession with Ginger from Gilligan's Island all through high school?"

Dean gapes at him, as though this is hardly the time to reminisce about childhood crushes. "_What_?"

"You always had a thing for redheads," he clarifies. "It's like she was made for you."

"You're getting way ahead of yourself, brother."

"Am I? I don't know what went on in those few weeks, but whatever it was obviously meant something to her. Don't you see the way she looks at you?"

"Don't remind me," he grinds out.

"You need to go find her before something happens. When someone looks at you like that, they're not just gonna let it go."

Dean locks eyes with his brother. Even after everything, they have always been – at their core – very different people. They're on the same page when it comes to hunts or quests or anything external, but when it comes to more… _sentimental_ things, they often don't see eye-to-eye. And though they completely understand one another in the sense that they understand the other's thought process, they have difficulty understanding one another on an emotional level. Something inside them just works differently – their hearts tick to a different beat. This is apparent now in the way Sam is staring at him, his hazel eyes swimming with frustration. He just doesn't get it.

. . .

It's funny how drinking offers clarity. Everything is spinning, colors are different than they should be, faces cease to exist, but somehow your thoughts are clear.

It's not always like this, of course, but there's a perfect place, a place between sobriety and oblivion, where everything comes together like a camera lens coming into focus. Claire has reached this place.

She leaves the bar, stopping in at the nearest tattoo parlor. It almost makes her feel normal, spontaneously deciding to get tattoo after a few too many adult beverages. Almost.

Her phone vibrates in her pocket, has been vibrating since her third glass of whiskey, and she continues to ignore it. It could be someone from home. It could be her parents, she thinks, knowing it isn't. They haven't heard from her in nearly a month, after all, and they usually see her on a weekly basis. It almost makes her feel hurt, like they've forgotten about her, like she's the last child they've let fall into the sinkhole. Almost.

She's not too drunk to work her phone and, carefully declining the call (it's Dean, she sees), she shows the tattoo artist what she would like. Where does she want it? Between her shoulder blades.

She's only a couple of blocks from the motel. If Dean really wants to find her, he can.

And more than halfway into the process, he does.

"What the hell are you doing?" he demands. The bell above the door rings innocuously as he busts in, much cleaner than before.

She's lying belly-down in the chair, and a black-haired guy who's inked up from head to toe is going to town on her bare back. He's almost done, he says, clearly put-off by Dean's entry.

"What does it look like I'm doing," she drawls (or maybe slurs?).

"Are you drunk?"

"_Nooo_," she retorts sardonically.

"Jesus," he mutters to himself, mussing his ashen hair. "Do you –" He halts his sentence and starts again, less loudly, when the tattoo artist gives him a thorny look. "Do you have any idea what I thought had happened? Why didn't you answer my calls?"

"Gee, I dunno."

"Is he bothering you?" Freddy – the tattoo artist – asks.

Dean gives him a hard glare, daring him to try to get rid of him.

"No, it's okay," she says, letting him sweat it out for a moment.

Soon enough he presses a bandage to her new tat and she pays him; all the while Dean is deadly quiet, wearing a stony expression.

On their way out of the parlor, Dean hisses, "This is what you do? Get drunk and get yourself tatted up?"

"It's Vegas," she shrugs, her tone so nonchalant that Dean has a difficult time believing it is still her. She's walking quickly, at least two paces in front of him.

He grabs her elbow. "Will you slow down for a sec?" It's not that he can't keep up. It's that she's trying to lose him.

"Why," she snaps.

"Because I wanna talk to you."

"Talk about what? I think you've said just about all there is to say."

"Claire, stop it."

She wrenches away from him. "No, you stop it."

He exhales loudly and says, "Fine. We won't talk. Let's just walk."

And so they do. No words are exchanged between them, but Claire feels him next to her but not touching her, feels his eyes on her, feels the tension between them.

It gets cold at night. She's not chilly, not really, but the air in her lungs is crisp and it sobers her up, makes her feel more alert. Dean leads them to a park, an oasis in the desert of lights and skyscrapers. There is a great deal of palm trees and it's obvious that this park is manmade, but it's still nature and for some reason it doesn't seem to matter. Everything was constructed by someone at some point, after all.

They sit on a stone bench, utterly alone. Things are both clear and unclear now.

"I think I should be honest with you," he starts, as though he hadn't been before.

"Okay."

"I care about you. And I think you care about me."

He takes her silence as an affirmation.

"So," he continues, "I want you to understand that the reason I'm suggesting this is because I think it's what's best for you. What I said before, about the whole relationship thing, that was a dick-move. I shouldn't've said it. Whatever we are, there's definitely something here – maybe I don't want there to be, maybe _you_ don't want there to be, but there is. It hasn't been long, but you know more about me than most everyone else and I feel like I know you pretty well too. I wouldn't suggest this if I didn't think it was the best thing."

Claire takes a minute to collect and order the thoughts shooting like comets through her skull. "I know you're used to making most of the decisions, Dean," she begins, "But so am I. And this isn't a decision that I'm going to let you make for me. Maybe I do care about you, maybe you do care about me, but that doesn't give you the right to choose my path in life. If you don't want to see me again, fine – that's one thing. You're allowed to make your own choices. But it's something totally different to order me what to do."

"I'm not trying to order you what to do," he replies, urging her to see his side. "If you don't come with me and you don't go with Bobby, what are you gonna do?"

Claire gestures to the thick square of gauze on her back, which is exposed to the brisk night by the neckline of her tank top. He can't see it, but it's the very same warding symbol that he and Sam have. "I'll learn to protect myself."

Dean's expression changes to one of cornered hopelessness. "I don't think – "

"You don't get to say," she interrupts. "Think about this from my perspective. I will see you and Sam in my visions – probably until I die – reminding me constantly that you tried to pass me off to someone else. Think of how cruel that is."

"I wish I could take you with me," he counters direly, "I wish I knew I could keep you safe. But I've lost so many people…" His gaze is secured on the ground as his voice breaks. "I've lost so many friends already – my mom, my dad… And the ones that stick around, they're not the same. Just look at Cas, and even Sammy. _I'm _not the same. You gotta understand – I can only take so much."

"I understand," she deadpans. "So when you and Sam leave tomorrow, we'll go our separate ways."

His face contorts into a look of unwillingness, but he says, "Alright. I can't force you to do anything you don't want to."

"That's right."

He looks up to see that she is watching him intently, and as her face moves closer to his, his body stills. Soon she is close enough to count the number of freckles smattered across the bridge of his nose.

She presses her lips softly to his in a goodbye kiss. It is quiet around them and almost romantic, but there are no stars on account of the light pollution and car horns blare faintly in the distance.

Dean's hand comes to rest at the side of her face, and he deepens the kiss. If this is the last time they do this, he's gonna make sure as hell it's good.

Somewhere within him, he loathes that he's become so attached so easily. It goes against everything he has ever thought about himself. He was always a no-strings-attached kind of guy, the type to have a girl in every port. It was comfortable that way because that's how it was always supposed to be.

Growing up, he watched his dad burn through chains of women, watched him drown his sorrows in booze and hookers. This was never confirmed outright, but as he entered his teenage years he learned to recognize the clues, and at some point they became inescapable. Long nights, separate rooms, the scent of cheap perfume clinging to that battered leather jacket – still clinging to it – all pointed in one very obvious yet non-vocalized direction. The memory of his mother faded with time, and soon enough John Winchester morphed into a man for whom love was just a pipe dream, lost somewhere in his distant memory. Deep down, Dean reckoned he at some point forgot what he was so angry about in the first place. He was the example Dean had followed, always followed, and the only one he'd ever had.

He saw what losing his mom did to him. He never wanted that for himself.

And then there's Bobby, lonely, broken Bobby who was forced to kill his own wife. And Sam and Jess. And they were all stronger than he is to begin with.

But he kisses her still – pours his whole heart into it – because he knows that this is just the end anyway.

* * *

**A/N: I considered making this the _end_ end for a hot second, but then I realized that I am not a sadist. So there's going to be one more chapter lol. Thanks so much for sticking around so far, and let me know what you think!**


	14. Ramble On

**A/N: This is it, guys, this is the grand finale! I just want to thank all the reviewers again, especially ImpalaLove, PadfootCc, themightypanda, Nemu-Chan, and toridw317 for reviewing the last chapter. I'm so lucky to have consistent feedback from so many of you, and I just want you to know how much I appreciate it! I hope everyone enjoys this chapter.**

**Song: Ramble On by Led Zeppelin**

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**CHAPTER 14**

**Ramble On**

The kiss on the park bench was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not their last kiss.

They make it back to the motel, but stop outside the door to their room. Now there's a sort of implicit and melancholy acceptance between them – they're both too stubborn to bend to the other's will, but that doesn't mean the spark is gone.

Dean presses her against chipped beige paint, under the eerie scintillation of old fluorescent lights. It's not very late, but the hallway is abandoned.

"Ouch," she hisses as the area between her shoulder blades comes into contact with the wall. The pain is sharp now that the fog of alcohol has dissipated.

"Sorry," he repents into her hair, twirling them – almost gracefully – so that instead he is the one against the wall.

Claire stands on her toes to reach his mouth, pressing her full weight into him, trapping him, making him feel that she is solid and real and not gone yet. There's not even an inch between the two, and still she arches into his firm body, trying to erase space that does not exist. He knows he should not encourage this or anything beyond this because it will only make things ten-times harder in the morning, but his blood runs hot like lava when he slips his hands beneath the hem of her shirt, and even more so when her silken fingertips skim over his jaw line. Neither of them is drunk now, and they can stop themselves if they have to. They can. He thinks they can.

She digs her palms into his torso, testing the ridges of his abs through his shirt, knotting her fingers into the blockade of soft cotton. Her hands go no further. To have this one thing in all the world and have to leave it will be a blow to both of them. They disagree on nearly everything apart from this.

Even just locked in this leisurely exploration, he feels something more than he should.

"Claire…" he whispers, transiently. His eyes are screwed shut and her mouth is warm on his neck.

He knows her heart rate is picking up because he can feel it throb against his bones, and his is too, and she stops moving and just rests against him. "I know," she breathes.

Impulse-control has never been his forte. His hands stay glued to her, defying his authority, and she snakes her arms around his waist. She presses her ear to his sternum and hears all the signs of vitality, of reality, before inclining her head to look at him. And he is already looking at her. They stay like this for a minute, jammed against each other and against the wall, and just study the other's face.

When he peers into her cornflower eyes he still sees that nameless thing that scares the hell out of him. And he's afraid that maybe she sees the same thing reflected in his.

"We should go in," she says eventually, and he nods his assent.

Giving her one last peck on the lips, he unlocks the door with a click and they step inside.

Sam is in Dean's bed, sleeping like a corpse. His gigantic form takes up more space than an average person's, and he looks a bit like a doll that was matched up with the wrong toy-set. He's flat on his back with his arms by his side, stiff as a board, and his features are relaxed. He is so unmoving that Dean strains his eyes to make sure that his chest is rising and falling – to his instantaneous relief, it is.

It's only around ten but they are all, understandably, dog-tired. Dean slides off his boots and Claire does the same, and they kiss one more time (this is the last time _really_, they both think), before he collapses on the sofa and she on her bed.

. . .

"_We both knew it was going to come to this eventually." _

_His tone is precise and piercing, like a shot fired through the barrel of a sniper's rifle. He has not rehearsed this, but the words have been dancing through his brain, out of order, for months. Perhaps even forever. _

_He needs only to put them into sequence, and the message is elucidated._

_He is filled with light now, possessed by it. It is white-hot and scorching, it trickles through his veins like a sweet acid, a little like the power used to. _

_If he could be alive, he thinks, he would be dead. He wants to be dead, because the light burns._

_It is quite a thing to be awake and asleep at the same time._

"_It's over," he tells him gently, and it is fact. And he sees what he sees but he cannot say what he means._

_And if it is over, truly, he wants to die too, wants it to end, the darkness to swallow the light. _

_Does it hurt very much? he wonders, only briefly._

_But how could it? It is dark underground._

Claire crashes into consciousness when Sam does. At first he turns his head in her direction from five feet to her left, eyebrows drawn in ashamed bewilderment, but when she reaches for her laptop with a grimace he suddenly comprehends. She's learned to bite her tongue to keep from crying out. In one way or another, it's progress.

"Did you… Did you see that?" he whispers cautiously, trying not to wake Dean.

The clock reads 4:45 AM. He will be up soon anyway. It's a miracle he's slept through the night in the first place.

"Yeah," is all she says. Her fingers move rapidly, and as they race across the keyboard the agony appears to slowly leach out of her head.

The blue glow of the backlit screen is lost when she shuts her laptop, and now that his pupils had adjusted to the light he can't see her face. He stares into the darkness, considering something, before hissing, "Can I talk to you outside for a minute?"

She nods pointlessly, and he receives her affirmation in only the abrupt rustling of sheets. They both climb out of bed and tiptoe to the door as noiselessly as they possibly can, and cringe to themselves when their exit allows a sliver of light into the room. Luckily it's gone quickly, and Dean, like his brother, is a heavy sleeper.

There's a small window at the end of the hallway; the last vestiges of night are beginning to disperse as the initial rays of early-morning light replace them, barely visible on the horizon.

Claire crosses her arms over her chest, bleary-eyed. "What's up?" she asks.

Sam's own eyes are swollen to a squint, and the newfound brightness of overhead lighting isn't doing either of them any favors. He towers over her to a comical extent – she has to crane her neck dramatically to even look at his face.

"I need to talk to you about Dean," he prefaces.

"Dean and I are fine now. We already talked it out, and we both decided that it's best if we both just go our separate ways."

"No, you see," he starts hesitantly, inhaling a deep, anxious breath, "you can't. I can't stay with him. Not right now, at least. I'm in a bad place, and trying to forget about it and going back to hunting and suppressing it isn't gonna work for me like it does for him. I need to take time off."

"You're going to leave him?" she questions in disbelief.

"I'm not going to _leave_ him," he says guiltily, "I'll tell him where I'm going. I just… I need a break from all this – I need to get off the ride."

"And what if he doesn't want to get off the ride?"

He fidgets uncomfortably, shifting his weight from one mammoth foot to the other. "Then we stay apart."

Something alien and protective bubbles in Claire's throat, something she hasn't felt in a long while. "Do you have any idea how hard he looked for you? How much time he spent trying to get you back, to make sure you were safe?"

"I know," he admits, taken aback by her candor. "But I – I can't do it. I don't know what'll happen to me if I try to just ignore this. I just… I can't."

He's giving her that puppy-dog look and Claire's expression softens some. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I'm going to leave before he wakes up – before he can try to stop me – and I wanted a chance to explain myself to you."

She feels suddenly like she's joined some conspiracy against Dean, and it makes her stomach roil.

"My brother… He shouldn't be alone," he continues.

"You want me to stay with him? Is that what you're asking? Because we already went over this – he does _not_ want me with him."

"If I'm gone, he'll cave. Dean hates to be alone – he _shouldn't_ be alone. He doesn't get that if even you tape the shattered pieces of something back together, it's not going to be the same as it was before, and each time it breaks it's only going to get worse. At some point, it just stops being the same thing altogether. He wants it to be me and him forever, wants it to be like it always was, like it was when we were kids, but it's impossible. It may not feel right without me, but it won't feel right with me either. If I drop out, if I don't cooperate, he'll be forced to face reality."

"So what, you want me to just badger him until he agrees to let me go with him?"

"It won't come to that – it won't take that much to convince him. Dean may seem extremely pigheaded, but he's more easily swayed by his emotions than you might think."

Claire stays quiet, so he continues, "But if I go, it'll still be really hard for him, even if he knows I'm okay. Will you promise me you'll keep an eye on him?"

She falters at first, but eventually agrees, "Yeah, I guess…"

"Good. Thank you," he replies earnestly.

They size each other up for a moment, unsure how to end the conversation. Sam takes the plunge and pulls her into a hug, his body completely engulfing hers.

When the break apart he starts to go back inside, but she adds, "But why – if you don't mind my asking – if you know it's going to hurt him so much, why would you do this to him?"

Sam frowns, conflicted. "My brother," he begins, organizing his thoughts, "My brother doesn't understand that I'm not like him. He wants me to just do what he says – do what he did –, but he doesn't get that we're not the same. If I just blindly listen to him, I'm not going to make it. I don't know what will happen to me, but it won't be anything good. Dean… he's my older brother and he always thought he knew what was best – and for the longest time I thought he did, too. But he never had this darkness inside him like I do. Sure, some bad shit has happened to him and that's left a mark – of course. But this… this darkness, this _corruption _was never part of him like it is with me. He doesn't understand."

Claire chews her lower lip contemplatively, letting his words settle in the air. "Alright," she murmurs. "I'll try my best to look after him, if he lets me."

He gives her a morose smile. "I know him – he will."

If Dean can't make the right decision for himself, he's going to have to shove him into it.

. . .

Claire re-awakes at six AM to "SON-OF-A-BITCH" piercing like a bolt of lightening through her subconscious.

She jerks to a sitting position just in time to see Dean hurl the coffeemaker across the room. It smashes against the wall with a loud _crunch_, denting the plaster and sending jagged pieces of broken plastic fluttering to the floor. They litter the grubby, brownish carpet, sparkling like shards of obsidian.

"What's the matter?!" she questions, feigning ignorance. Her sleep-laden vocal chords and the fact that she has been so rudely awakened add to the plausibility of her charade.

"Sam" is his only reply. This simple, three-letter word is an incantation, a curse, and a prayer all rolled into one. The source of his murderous rage is a harmless-looking sheet of paper on the nightstand.

The sun has risen now, and it filters in lines through the Venetian blinds.

"Did he leave?" she asks, almost inaudibly.

His eyes snap to look at her, picking up on something in her tone. In this light, his hair and his irises and his skin are all varying shades of the same golden color.

"Did you know?" His tone is disturbingly even.

"He might have mentioned something…"

"Dammit, Claire!" he explodes.

She flinches and he crumbles onto the sofa, folding in on himself. His hands rake through his short crop of hair, making it stand on end, and then rub his eyes raw. She can hear the calluses on the heels of his palms scraping against his stubble, rough and grating. When he finally exposes his face to her, he looks like hell. He turns his gaze up to the water-stained ceiling, looking, searching, trying to use gravity to force unshed tears back into his eye-sockets.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs, not knowing what else to say.

"How could you let him go?" comes a fraught, rasping voice that sounds like a warped version of Dean's.

"I don't think I really _let_ Sam do anything."

"You know what I mean," he warns. "How could you not tell me?"

"He didn't want me to."

He laughs and it's acidic and cold and makes her want to flinch again. "That's your excuse?"

"Did he leave a note? What did it say?" she counters, trying to shift his focus off of her.

"He said he 'needs time to process,' whatever the fuck that means."

"Did he say where he's going?"

"It says he doesn't know yet, but that he'll let me know when he does – it also says that I shouldn't go looking for him unless I intend to join him on his little vacation," he answers bitingly.

"Why are you so opposed to giving him time to think?"

There is genuine curiosity in her tone, and it strikes a chord. His green eyes dance with stray flecks of sunlight from the window as he stares at her, at a crossroads. He could tell her the truth – tell her how it's not that he doesn't want to give Sam his space, it's that he can feel him changing, slipping away from him, or he could lie.

Eventually he responds, "Without Sam, I don't even know what this whole thing means. He says it's just a temporary deal for now, but what if it isn't, what if he never comes back? I went to fucking Purgatory to save him, and… and now he just _leaves_. I've spent every single second of every single day since Detroit wishing I could see him, wishing he would come back, and doing everything I possibly could to make it happen. I nearly flung myself over the ledge after him, but I didn't – I kept going, kept searching, and I never would have stopped – _never_. He couldn't even bear to stay a full twenty-four hours."

"I think Sam feels like he needs to do this to stay sane – it's the same reason you keep hunting, really," she tries. "I don't think you should take it so personally. I know you see everything in terms of Sam, and, well, so does Sam."

Such is the problem with youngest siblings, she thinks. No matter how selfless they may be, in the end, they worry primarily about themselves. The oldest is the one that's burdened with worrying about everyone else.

He massages his forehead, eyes screwed closed. "Maybe."

She slips out of bed, approaching him as she might a wild beast – with immense caution. He seems not to notice as she treads closer, and even as she comes to sit beside him he does not so much as peek through his eyelashes.

He senses she is nearer by the proximity of her voice. She says, "At least he's safe, at least you know he's not in trouble."

"For now. Something could happen, though, and I wouldn't know, I wouldn't be able to do anything." His voice breaks and so does her heart. Seeing these two, so tangled and dysfunctional, she cannot help but wonder where this road ends. She has seen one end, but she prays that this is not _the_ end.

"You can't be everywhere protecting everyone all the time, Dean."

"I know. Believe me, I know. I've learned that the hard way. But if there's just one person I can protect – just one – it's gotta be Sammy."

"I know…"

"Its just… I don't… I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I don't understand why he's doing this, _how_ he can do this."

With the same level of care she exercised walking over, she places one hand on his shoulder. She can feel his muscles twist and coil through the scratchy flannel beneath her palm. They sit, paralyzed and tense and linked only by her hand, for several long moments, until he caves into her. He's not crying, not really, but his eyes are bloodshot and glistening. Despite this, though, his features have hardened. His jaw is set and his teeth are gritted.

It all seems easier now, now that he has truly broken. She brushes her fingers along his hairline absently, his golden head in her lap. Their arms are interlinked and knotted around one another, confused and inextricable, and she's not sure how they came to be like this.

"I'll come with you now, at least until Sam comes back." All this time she has been asking him things, but this she tells him. "And when he does, I'll stay where you want me to." It's a fair compromise, she wagers.

He turns his head to look at her for the first time since she sat beside him and slowly rises to an upright position, as though his collapse had been a temporary slip. His lips part to speak, but she insists, "Don't try to tell me otherwise."

He purses his lips again, before grinding out, "I wasn't going to…" He swallows in an attempt to stifle the lump building in his throat, burning like a hot coal. He goes on, "But after everything you've seen, how could you possibly want this?"

She bristles. "You know why," she tells him gravely. "You _know_."

His pupils dart back and forth, reading hers, scouring her face for any indication that she is lying. He wishes she were.

Dean feels so much and so deeply that he sometimes feels with parts of himself that he is not meant to. He feels this, this unnamed emotion radiating off of her like something tangible, in his lungs. His breath hitches. He stands, pacing to the other side of the room like an animal testing the boundaries of its cage.

"This… this is as much as it will ever be," he chokes out, trying to extinguish the blaze consuming him from within. His fists ball, but then slacken as he remembers that fight or flight is not an option here.

She follows him across the room, this same room where everything else has come apart.

"This is enough," she states, and he does not believe.

She grasps his wrist and she is trembling, trying to steady herself, trying to get through to him.

"Don't," he whispers, tugging back his hand. "_Don't_." If she says the word it will all be over.

"Dean," she says plainly. "There's no reason to be like this."

There is every reason, he thinks but does not say. The word, the name of the unnamed emotion, hovers tacitly in the air. He dreads to hear it with his brain, but longs to hear it with his heart.

She doesn't say it. Instead she gravitates towards him and though he stands rigid as a statue, every cell in his being gravitates towards her, too. But he fights them.

It's only when she kisses him that he loses the battle. It's not a kiss so much as it is a brushing of lips, but for this one second the thought of him and Sam and the Apocalypse and angels and demons and monsters and _everything but this_ flees his head, for perhaps the first time ever.

For Dean, a man who's spent his entire life teaching himself that he is worthless, having someone adore him so totally is a horrifying concept. There's no pressure when everyone is disappointed in you, when everyone expects you to fail.

Claire does not expect him to fail, nor is she disappointed in him just yet. But it's just a matter of time.

Still, it feels good to be close to somebody, to cling stupidly to this one thing in all the world. His features are contorted in pain through the kiss, but when she starts to pull away he does not want her to. Some new passion courses through his veins, lights his blood on fire. He sustains the connection, draws her in with a hand on either side of her face.

She touches his wrists again and when they break apart for air he sees pearl-like tears stuck to her lashes. She thought he was going to rebuff her, he realizes abruptly.

His expression is unreadable. His thoughts are conveyed only when he fuses his lips once more with hers. He maneuvers their entangled figures gradually, until the backs of his knees buckle when they hit the edge of the mattress. Like this, she stands above him and wedges herself between his legs.

She pulls his shirt over his head and he lays back. She discards of hers next, tossing it into the growing heap on the floor amongst the shattered plastic from the coffeemaker, and straddles his waist.

Her fingers trace the collection of scars on his torso and he remembers that these are only a fraction of what was once there. The skin is only healed on the outside.

It is strange how something can happen so quickly and so slowly all at the same time. In what seems like an instant the rest of their clothes have dematerialized, but he can feel every millimeter of her flesh touching his at half-speed.

He spins them so that he looms above her on the bed, and studies her face. Her flaming locks fan around her head like a halo.

"Dean, it's okay," she breathes, misinterpreting his pause as reluctance.

He kisses her, dragging his tongue so languidly and reverently across her lower lip that she can almost pretend he loves her too.

_Loves?_ she thinks, shocked and appalled that this has slipped out, even if it's only in the sanctity of her own brain. But it's too late now. There's no going back.

His hands drift over her skin, ephemeral at first. He avoids her bandage and merely ghosts his blunt and bruised fingertips over her back and the sharp curve of her waist, but as she sinks onto him his mild intent escapes him. He cannot help but curl his fingers into her, reach for her, hold her against him like she is the only thing anchoring him to this earth. Her bones feel fragile beneath the hands that have hurt so many, but still she is remarkably concrete.

As his grip on her intensifies, his grip on his torment withers. Soon enough it is just the two of them, with no history and no future. Present. Existing. Nothing more and nothing less.

He is face to face with her, and if he opens his eyes he can see hers just a hair's breadth away, bright blue, like the heavens. His are the same hue as all the prisons that have contained him. He is the earth and she is the sky. She is the light that guides him upwards, away from the darkness below.

He looks at her when her eyes are closed, and she looks at him when his are. They watch each other in secret, searching for meaning. Eventually blue meets green, and even though they are already joined they are joined again. She sees, sees everything that he has kept from her and has not said, even beyond the dreams and the nightmares and the memories. She, who once required an explanation for everything, can see it all from just one look.

She holds him as tightly as he holds her, as though _he_ is the only thing anchoring _her_ to this earth. He finds this desperate embrace and the weight of her body atop his incredibly reassuring.

What they are doing is very normal in some ways, but very abnormal in others. It's normal in that they oscillate between frenzied and tender, but it is abnormal in the way it affects him in the other corners of his body. He genuinely doesn't understand why she's chosen him – why anyone ever chooses him for anything. He's bad with girls, he's bad at making decisions, he's bad at doing what he's told. He used to be so obedient, such a good soldier. Now he can't even follow his own orders.

But he does not think about these things at the moment. He buries them, like everything else that has ever haunted him. There is no ambivalence in his movements, no indication that he doubts this is the right choice. He moves against her, moves with her, moves towards the light at the end of the tunnel. He can feel her all around him. The warmth is overwhelming. He grazes his teeth over her collarbone, probably too hard, but she holds his head there and the sound of the blood rushing through her body fills his ears. Their heartbeats are erratic, but somehow still in sync with one another.

He presses her back, into the sheets, and twines his fingers with hers. And though they did this once before it now feels completely different, like they are different, and maybe they are.

"_Dean_…" she gasps.

He didn't expect to hear his name and it sends him spiraling over the edge all at once. The release is sudden, sneaking up on both of them and leaving them a bit dizzy.

He rolls off of her and she rolls onto him, one arm flung across his torso. They could fall asleep like this, but the morning is in full swing and they know they must leave.

Dean stares at the ceiling and tries to catch the thoughts flying through his brain.

The next hour or so is a blur. In the shower they try to cleanse themselves of this strange feeling, but the roots are already growing inside them; if they try to weed it out now, they might break something.

Later they shove crumpled clothes into battered bags, carelessly. The the only traces of the tornado that struck remain in the form of smashed property and wrecked sheets, left untouched for someone else to clean up. And then they leave it _all_ behind, almost like it never happened.

It's not until they have retreated into the Impala that Dean decides one of them should speak.

"Claire," he says finally, "I'm glad you're coming with me."

**THE END**

* * *

**A/N: I know this is kind of an odd place to end it and in some ways I thought the last chapter might have been truer to the tone of the overall story (which, admittedly, is kind of dismal), but I felt like it captured the culmination of their relationship so I just went with it. As for a sequel - I have an idea, but I would actually love to run it by someone because I'm not sure if it's worth pursuing or not. I don't want to spoil it for anyone if I do go through with it though, so if you'd be willing to hear me out maybe say so in a review or PM me? Whichever is more convenient.**

**And finally, I hope you all liked it. Again, thank you so much to everyone who has reviewed, favorited, or subscribed to this story. Let me know what you think! :)**

**xx Persephone**


	15. Author's Note

**Author's Note**

**Hi everyone! I just wanted to let you know that I posted a sequel to this story, called The Sound of Silence. **


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